Microsoft Collaborated With The NSA, CIA And FBI, Freely Gave User Data From Its Services

Hotmail, SkyDrive, Outlook and Skype video and chat messages were all given to the NSA, CIA and FBI to use freely, and was even called around their circles “team sport”.

It has been uncovered by The Guardian that Microsoft isn’t only giving the U.S. Government’s spying agencies its users data, both through normal chat messages and email, but also video calls via Skype, and even gave the NSA unprecedented access to its new email service dubbed Outlook, working to ensure that the NSA had a solution that allowed it to circumvent encryption on Outlook.com chats.

A newsletter entry dated 26 December 2012 states: “MS [Microsoft], working with the FBI, developed a surveillance capability to deal” with the issue. “These solutions were successfully tested and went live 12 Dec 2012.”

Two months later, in February this year, Microsoft officially launched the Outlook.com portal.

Another newsletter entry stated that NSA already had pre-encryption access to Outlook email. “For Prism collection against Hotmail, Live, and Outlook.com emails will be unaffected because Prism collects this data prior to encryption.”

But the program was not limited to Outlook; with every veritable service that the Redmond, Washington giant offers being part of the massive breach of privacy agenda, including SkyDrive, Microsoft’s massive cloud-based service with over 250 million users worldwide, Hotmail, Outlook and, most disconcerting for the gamer, Skype, which the NSA has been given access to not only chats, but video calls. Skype is now an integral part of Xbox One, and with Kinect 2.0 coming bundled with the console and needs to be always on, always watching, nothing could be more troubling.

Here’s Microsoft’s response:

We have clear principles which guide the response across our entire company to government demands for customer information for both law enforcement and national security issues. First, we take our commitments to our customers and to compliance with applicable law very seriously, so we provide customer data only in response to legal processes. Second, our compliance team examines all demands very closely, and we reject them if we believe they aren’t valid. Third, we only ever comply with orders about specific accounts or identifiers, and we would not respond to the kind of blanket orders discussed in the press over the past few weeks, as the volumes documented in our most recent disclosure clearly illustrate.

To be clear, Microsoft does not provide any government with blanket or direct access to SkyDrive, Outlook.com, Skype or any Microsoft product. Finally when we upgrade or update products legal obligations may in some circumstances require that we maintain the ability to provide information in response to a law enforcement or national security request. There are aspects of this debate that we wish we were able to discuss more freely. That’s why we’ve argued for additional transparency that would help everyone understand and debate these important issues.

Via The Guardian.