Microsoft Corp worked closely with U.S. intelligence
services to help them intercept users' communications, including letting the
National Security Agency circumvent email encryption, the Guardian reported on
Thursday.
Citing top-secret documents provided by former U.S.
spy contractor Edward Snowden, the UK newspaper said Microsoft worked with the
Federal Bureau of Investigations and the NSA to ease access via Prism - an
intelligence-gathering program uncovered by the Guardian last month - to cloud
storage service SkyDrive.
Microsoft also helped the Prism program collect
video and audio of conversations conducted via Skype, Microsoft's online chat
service, the newspaper added.
Microsoft had previously said it did not provide the
NSA direct access to users' information. On Thursday, it repeated that it
provides customer data only in response to lawful government requests.
"To be clear, Microsoft does not provide any
government with blanket or direct access to SkyDrive, Outlook.com, Skype or any
Microsoft product," the company said in a statement on its website.
Facebook Inc, Google Inc and Microsoft had all
publicly urged U.S. authorities to allow them to reveal the number and scope of
the surveillance requests after documents leaked to the Washington Post and the
Guardian suggested they had given the government "direct access" to
their computers as part of the NSA's Prism program.
PRISM is a clandestine
mass electronic surveillance
program operated by the United States National Security Agency
(NSA) since 2007. PRISM is a government code
name
for a data-collection effort known officially by the SIGAD
US-984XN.
PRISM began in 2007 in the wake of the passage of
the Protect America Act.
The program is operated under the
supervision of the U.S.
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court, or FISC)
pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act (FISA). Its existence was leaked
five years later by NSA contractor Edward
Snowden, who warned that the extent of mass data collection
was far greater than the public knew and included what he characterized as
"dangerous" and "criminal" activities. The disclosures were published by The
Guardian and The Washington Post
on June 6, 2013.
A document included in the leak indicated that PRISM
was "the number one source of raw intelligence used for NSA analytic
reports." The leaked information came to light one day after the
revelation that the FISA Court had been ordering a subsidiary of
telecommunications company Verizon Communications
to turn over to the NSA logs tracking all of its customers' telephone calls on
an ongoing daily basis.
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