Today, Glenn Greenwald, the journalist behind the NSA revelations, released an excerpt from his new book, "No Place to Hide." The book mainly focuses on Greenwald"s relationship with Edward Snowden, the man responsible for leaking the information about the NSA"s spying programs, but also contains four interesting new slides detailing the NSA"s relationship with Microsoft and it"s data collection from Skype, Outlook.com and SkyDrive (now called OneDrive).
Discovered by TechCrunch, the new documents show that Microsoft was complict with the NSA in sharing user information, amongst other things, with the intelligence agency. At the time, Microsoft provided the following statements regarding the data collection:
SkyDrive:
In 2013 we made changes to our processes to be able to continue to comply with an increasing number of legal demands of governments worldwide. None of these changes provided any government with direct access to SkyDrive.
Outlook.com:
First, while we did discuss legal compliance requirements with the government as reported last week, in none of these discussions did Microsoft provide or agree to provide any government with direct access to user content or the ability to break our encryption. Second, these discussions were instead about how Microsoft would meet its continuing obligation to comply with the law by providing specific information in response to lawful government orders.
Skype:
The reporting last week made allegations about a specific change in 2012. We continue to enhance and evolve the Skype offerings and have made a number of improvements to the technical back-end for Skype, such as the 2012 move to in-house hosting of “supernodes” and the migration of much Skype IM traffic to servers in our data centers. These changes were not made to facilitate greater government access to audio, video, messaging or other customer data.
Below are excerpted documents from today"s Greenwald leaks.
While the documents do not reveal much new information, they do highlight just how close Microsoft is working with the NSA in passing over user data.
Source: Glenn Greenwald, TechCrunch | Image via PC World