Microsoft worked hand-in-hand with
the United States government in order to let federal investigators bypass
encryption mechanisms meant to protect the privacy of millions of users, Edward
Snowden told the Guardian.
According to an article published on
Thursday by the British paper, internal National Security Agency memos show
that Microsoft actually helped the federal government find a way to decrypt
messages sent over select platforms, including the Outlook.com Web chat, the
Hotmail email service and the Skype messaging product.
The Guardian wrote that Snowden, the
30-year-old former systems administrator for NSA contractor Booz Allen
Hamilton, provided the paper with files detailing a sophisticated relationship
between America’s intelligence sector and Silicon Valley.
The documents, claim the Guardian,
are marked top-secret and come in the wake of other high-profile disclosures
that have been attributed to Snowden since he first started collaborating with
the paper for articles published beginning June 6.
The United States government
has since indicted Snowden under the Espionage Act, and he has requested asylum
from no fewer than 20 foreign nations.
Thursday’s article is authored by
Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, two journalists who interviewed Snowden at
length before he publically revealed himself to be the source of the NSA leaks.
They are joined by co-authors Ewen
MacAskill, Spencer Ackerman and Dominic Rushe, who wrote that the classified
documents reveal not just the degree in which Microsoft worked with the feds,
but also detail the Internet surveillance program known as PRISM previously
disclosed by the whistle blower, as well as tech companies’ true relationship
with the government as brokered through back-door deals.
“The latest NSA revelations
further expose the tensions between Silicon Valley and the Obama administration,”
the journalists wrote.
“All the major tech firms are
lobbying the government to allow them to disclose more fully the extent and
nature of their cooperation with the NSA to meet their customers’ privacy
concerns.
Privately, tech executives are at
pains to distance themselves from claims of collaboration and teamwork given by
the NSA documents, and insist the process is driven by legal compulsion.”
In the case of Microsoft, however,
it appears as if the Bill Gates-founded tech company went out of its
way to assist federal investigators.
Edward Snowden (AFP Photo)
Among the discoveries made by the
latest Snowden leaks, Guardian journalists say that Microsoft specifically
aided the NSA in circumventing encrypted chat messages sent over the
Outlook.com portal before the product was even launched to the public.
“The files show that the NSA
became concerned about the interception of encrypted chats on Microsoft’s
Outlook.com portal from the moment the company began testing the service in
July last year,” they wrote.
“Within five months, the
documents explain, Microsoft and the FBI had come up with a solution that
allowed the NSA to circumvent encryption on Outlook.com chats.”
According to internal documents
cited by the journalists, Microsoft “developed a surveillance capability”
that was launched “to deal” with the feds’ concerns that they’d be
unable to wiretap encrypted communications conducted over the Web in real time.
“These solutions were
successfully tested and went live 12 Dec 2012,” the memo claims, two months
before the Outlook.com portal was officially launched.
In a tweet, Greenwald wrote that “the
‘document’ for the Microsoft story is an internal, ongoing NSA bulletin over 3
years,” and that the Guardian “quoted all relevant parts.”
The document is not included in the
article.
Elsewhere in the report, the
Guardian revealed that Microsoft worked with intelligence agencies in order to
let administrators of the PRISM data collection program easily access user
intelligence submitted through its cloud storage service SkyDrive and the Skype
messaging program.
“Skype, which was bought by
Microsoft in October 2011, worked with intelligence agencies last year to allow
Prism to collect video of conversations as well as audio,” they wrote.
That allegation comes as a stark
contrast to claims made previously by Skype in which they swore to protect the
privacy of its users.
It doesn’t come as a terrible
surprise, however, and RT reported
previously that earlier documentation supplied by Snowden showed that
the government possesses the ability to listen in or watch Skype chats “when
one end of the call is a conventional telephone and for any combination of
‘audio, video, chat and file transfers’ when Skype users connect by computer
alone.”
AFP Photo
Earlier, RT acknowledged that
Microsoft obtained a patent last summer that provides for “legal intercept”
technology that allows for agents to “silently copy communication
transmitted via the communication session” without asking for user
authorization.
In recent weeks, however, Microsoft
has attacked the government over its secretive spy powers and even asked the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court if they could be more transparent in
discussing the details of FISA requests compiling tech companies for data.
“We continue to believe that what
we are permitted to publish continues to fall short of what is needed to help
the community understand and debate these issues,” Microsoft Vice President
John Frank wrote last month.
“In the past, Skype made
affirmative promises to users about their inability to perform wiretaps,”
Chris Soghoian of the American Civil Liberties Union told the Guardian.
“It’s hard to square Microsoft’s
secret collaboration with the NSA with its high-profile efforts to compete on
privacy with Google.”
Earlier this week, Yahoo
requested that the FISA court unseal documents in their own FISA
battle.
That ruling in 2008 compelled Yahoo, and later other Silicon Valley entities, to supply the government with user data without requiring a warrant.
“Blanket orders from the secret
surveillance court allow these communications to be collected without an
individual warrant if the NSA operative has a 51 percent belief that the target
is not a US citizen and is not on US soil at the time,” the Guardian
reporters wrote.
“Targeting US citizens does
require an individual warrant, but the NSA is able to collect Americans’
communications without a warrant if the target is a foreign national located
overseas.”
During a press conference this past
march, FBI general counsel Andrew Weissman said that federal investigators plan
on being able to wiretap any real-time Internet conversation by the end of
2014.
“You do have laws that say you
need to keep things for a certain amount of time, but in the cyber realm you
can have companies that keep things for five minutes,” he said.
“You can imagine totally
legitimate reasons for that, but you can also imagine how enticing that ability
is for people who are up to no good because the evidence comes and it goes.”
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