Documents reveal Microsoft's close cooperation with intelliegence agencies
13 Jul 2013
Collaborating closely with US intelligence services, Microsoft allowed communications of users to be intercepted, which included helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company's own encryption.
The Guardian has rvealed that it received top-secret files provided by Edward Snowden that illustrated the extent to which Silicon Valley and intelligence agencies worked together over the last three years. The revelations also shed light on the workings of the top-secret PRISM program, which The Guardian and the The Washington Post had disclosed last month.
The documents show that the agency was allowed by Microsoft to circumvent its encryption to address concerns that the agency would not be able to intercept web chats on the new Outlook.com portal. Further, the agency also had pre-encryption stage access to email on Outlook.com, including Hotmail;
- The company worked with the FBI this year to allow the NSA easier access via Prism to its cloud storage service SkyDrive, which now had in excess of 250 million users worldwide;
- The software giant also worked with the Data Intercept Unit of the FBI to "understand" potential issues with a feature in Outlook.com that allowed users to create email aliases;
- In July last year, nine months after the acquisition of Skype by Microsoft, the NSA claimed with a new capability the number of Skype video calls being collected through Prism had tripled;
- Material collected through PRISM was routinely shared with the FBI and CIA, and an NSA document described the programme as a "team sport".
According to the documents the NSA became concerned when Microsoft started testing Outlook.com, and asked for access. It took five months for the company to create a workaround for the FBI that gave the NSA access to encrypted chats on Outlook.com. The system went live in December last year – two months ahead of the commercial launch of Outlook.com.
The documents showed that those Outlook users that do not enable encryption get their data accessed as a matter of course. "For Prism collection against Hotmail, Live, and Outlook.com emails will be unaffected because Prism collects this data prior to encryption," an NSA newsletter states.
Working with the NSA Microsoft also made its cloud storage service SkyDrive, easy to access, thanks to Redmond's work with the NSA.
On 8 April, 2013, the agency reported that Microsoft had built PRISM access into Skydrive in such a way as to remove the need for NSA analysts to get special authorisation for searches in Microsoft's cloud.
