Microsoft’s cooperation with the NSA and FBI on the controversial Prism program has been laid bare in a new book written by an American journalist who brought it to public attention in the first place.
Glenn Greenwald, the American journalist who worked extensively with Edward Snowden, wrote in a new book that Microsoft’s cloud services allowed the National Security Agency [NSA] to collect data from a range of its different cloud options.
"Beginning on 7 March 2013, Prism now collects Microsoft SkyDrive data as part of Prism's standard Store Communications collection package for a tasked FISA Amendments Act Section 702 [FAA702] selector,” stated a slide released by Greenwald, according to Cloud Pro.
It is detailed in Greenwald’s new book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the Surveillance State, and goes on to hint that Microsoft was implicit in the NSA data collecting process.
"This success is the result of the FBI working for many months with Microsoft to get this tasking and collection solution established," the document stated.
Part of the reason that it was able to do this was down to the FISA Amendment Act of 2008 that legalized NSA Internet surveillance and allowed warrantless wiretapping by the NSA and related agencies.
"This means that analysts will no longer have to make a special request to SSO for this. This new capability will result in a much more complete and timely collection response from SSO for our enterprise customers," the documents added.
Other sabotage methods employed by the NSA and outlined in Greenwald’s book include the supply-chain interdiction, which meant intercepting various communications products in order to carry out covert surveillance. This included routers and servers made by Cisco and involved implanting beacons before the products were repackaged and shipped out to customers across the world.
"While American companies were being warned away from supposedly untrustworthy Chinese routers, foreign organizations would have been well advised to beware of American-made ones," Greenwald said.
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