Microsoft and the NSA ... Microsoft's response

Office WatchLast updated: 17 July 2018

Email Essentials,Microsoft Office,Microsoft Outlook,Office 2010,Office 2013,Office 365

Microsoft’s official response to the latest news about their work with the NSA and FBI.

Office-Watch.com has posed a series of specific questions to Microsoft which we hope will get a response in the next few days.

In the meantime here’s their official response to the Guardian article about Microsoft’s collaboration with the NSA and FBI to allow access to personal data.

“We have clear principles which guide the response across our entire company to government demands for customer information for both law enforcement and national security issues.

First, we take our commitments to our customers and to compliance with applicable law very seriously, so we provide customer data only in response to legal processes.

Second, our compliance team examines all demands very closely, and we reject them if we believe they aren’t valid.

Third, we only ever comply with orders about specific accounts or identifiers, and we would not respond to the kind of blanket orders discussed in the press over the past few weeks, as the volumes documented in our most recent disclosure clearly illustrate.

To be clear, Microsoft does not provide any government with blanket or direct access to SkyDrive, Outlook.com, Skype or any Microsoft product.

Finally when we upgrade or update products legal obligations may in some circumstances require that we maintain the ability to provide information in response to a law enforcement or national security request. There are aspects of this debate that we wish we were able to discuss more freely. That’s why we’ve argued for additional transparency that would help everyone understand and debate these important issues.”