Microsoft Petitions US Attorney General For Permission To Disclose Data Requests

MojoKid writes "Microsoft is smarting in the wake of the Guardian's discussion of how chummy it's gotten with the NSA over the past few years, and the company wants permission to clarify its relationship with the federal government. To that end, the company has sent a follow-up letter (PDF) to the Attorney General's office, asking it to please address the petition it filed in court back on June 19. Redmond is undoubtedly cringing at the accolades being heaped on Yahoo and its repeated court battles on behalf of its users, and wants an opportunity to clear the air. But Microsoft has gone farther than simply asking the government to hurry up and rule on its petition — it has also issued a series of clarifying remarks regarding its relationship with the NSA. Microsoft refutes some of the Guardian's claims strongly. It insists it does not provide encryption keys or access to Outlook's encryption mechanisms, and that the government must petition MS to provide information via the legal process."

smoke and mirrors

[Charliemopps]

All these companies are feigning outrage over these "requests" they get, when in reality I doubt the requests are ever used except in cases where the government needs evidence in court. The REAL data collection is done without Microsoft/Googles direct knowledge. The NSA surely has agents working on staff at every major tech company in the world with the sole goal of installing as many NSA backdoors as possible. The idea that the NSA has no respect what-so-ever of the American peoples privacy but at the same time wouldn't just take the same sort of data from a corporation is idiotic.

Re:Damage control

[SilentStaid]

I'm currently working for a fairly large 2500+ employee multi-national that regularly handles confidential information belonging to other businesses. I can safely tell you that we have scaled back all of our efforts to move things to the cloud and have actually reversed the trend by bringing more and more things in house over the past year. This orignally started with several data privacy laws enacted in the EU that made farming things out prohibitively expensive but perhaps the most interesting part of this is that since the various leaks this year, we've been getting more scrutiny from foreign companies about what we could have any hope of keeping from the government if asked.