Microsoft’s Surveillance Collaboration: Voluntary Aid, or New Legal Tactic?

In July of last year, Microsoft began publicly testing an online e-mail and chat service called Outlook.com. Soon afterward, according to the British newspaper the Guardian, the company reengineered it in a way that allowed the National Security Agency’s PRISM surveillance program collect chat data before it was encrypted.

Privacy campaigners and surveillance experts are now pondering whether Microsoft’s actions were forced by a previously unknown legal tactic, or whether the company voluntarily made the changes to aid surveillance. The Guardian report marks the first time that a major Internet company has been described to have modified its systems to enable government surveillance, as opposed to simply providing access to data it already held. “The $1 million question is whether Microsoft was forced to reengineer its systems to include new surveillance capabilities, or whether it did so voluntarily,” says Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist and senior policy analyst with the Speech, Privacy and Technology Project of the American Civil Liberties Union.