NSA helped Microsoft to access encrypted messages, says newspaper

Microsoft has worked closely with the intelligence services of the U.S. to allow messages of its users were intercepted, helping the National Security Agency (NSA, its acronym in English) to circumvent the encryption of the company itself. The information was revealed on Thursday by the British newspaper The Guardian, which obtained secret documents with former CIA Technical Edward Snowden.

Microsoft denied the allegations. "To be clear, Microsoft does not provide any general or direct government access to SkyDrive, Outlook.com, Skype or any other product," the company said in a statement published on its website.

Files, according to The Guardian, illustrate the scale of cooperation between Silicon Valley and intelligence agencies in the past three years. They also shed new light on the workings of the secret program to monitor the NSA, Prism, which was published by The Guardian and The Washington Post last month.
According to documents leaked by Snowden last month, the NSA would have access to a huge amount of data from individual conversations of internet users and telephony. The leak also revealed that the program allowed Prisma spy servers from nine of the largest technology companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple.

The documents revealed on Thursday show that NSA helped Microsoft to bypass your encryption, as a response to concerns that the agency would be unable to intercept conversations in the new email service company, the Outlook.com. The company would also have worked with the FBI this year to allow the NSA had easy access to your cloud storage service SkyDrive.

Moreover, the documents show that Skype, which was acquired by Microsoft in October 2011, worked with intelligence agencies last year to allow the Prism coletasse video and audio conversations.

"We have clear principles that guide the response throughout our company to the government's demands for customer information, both for law enforcement and for issues of national security," Microsoft wrote in a note to The Guardian. "We take into account the commitments to our customers and compliance with applicable legislation very seriously, so we provide customer information only in response to legal process," the text continues.