NSA praises Redmond for ‘collaborative teamwork’
Ian Thomson
The Register [UK]
11th July 2013
There are red faces in Redmond after Edward Snowden released a new batch of documents from the NSA’s Special Source Operations (SSO) division covering Microsoft’s involvement in allowing backdoor access to its software to the NSA and others.
Documents seen by The Guardian detail how the NSA became concerned when Microsoft started testing Outlook.com, and asked for access. In five months Microsoft and the FBI created a workaround that gives the NSA access to encrypted chats on Outlook.com. The system went live in December last year – two months before Outlook.com’s commercial launch.
Those Outlook users not enabling encryption get their data slurped as a matter of course, the documents show. “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.
Microsoft’s cloud storage service SkyDrive is also easy to access, thanks to Redmond’s work with the NSA. The agency reported on April 8, 2013 that Microsoft has built PRISM access into Skydrive in such a way as to remove the need for NSA analysts to get special authorization for searches in Microsoft’s cloud…
The article continues at The Register.
Related: Holder Orders Skype to Allow NSA Surveillance Slate makes Microsoft the focus, completely ignores Eric Holder’s key involvement.
Microsoft asks Holder to ease gag on NSA program
Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder calling on him to personally review a gag order that prevents the company and others from further discussing secret national security requests for customer emails, Skype calls and documents stored on its servers.
The letter follows Microsoft’s motion in a secret court last month asking for permission to break out which requests were from law enforcement officials and which were from the National Security Agency. It hasn’t received a response.
A spokesman for the attorney general said the office is reviewing the letter…
CAIR Files Lawsuit Against NSA For Spying On Muslims…
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said Tuesday it is suing the National Security Agency to try to stop it from collecting and storing Americans’ phone records.
Eighteen privacy and civil liberties groups have joined together to file the suit…
Along those lines…Zimmerman’s Brother: We Think Obama Might Be Tapping Our Phones
