<story><title>How Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages</title><url>http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mtgx</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t get Microsoft. Are they really that hypocritical to the &lt;i&gt;core&lt;/i&gt; and so shameless? Why in the &lt;i&gt;world&lt;/i&gt; would they launch a &amp;quot;privacy&amp;quot; campaign against Google when they&amp;#x27;re in a &lt;i&gt;glass house&lt;/i&gt; themselves, and so vulnerable? Why the hell would they even put themselves on the spotlight like that?&lt;p&gt;Or are they really that comfortable with lying, that they have no problem attacking others over something, even though they are just as bad, or &lt;i&gt;worse&lt;/i&gt;(as this revelation seems to imply) Giving pre-encryption access to NSA? Really Microsoft?&lt;p&gt;To make things worse, they&amp;#x27;ve just put the guy who came up with that Scroogle crap in charge of their whole marketing department, so expect a lot more hypocritical&amp;#x2F;nasty stuff like that from Microsoft in the future:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-penn-microsofts-master-of-dark-political-arts-gets-a-boost-in-the-companys-new-reorg-2013-7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&amp;#x2F;mark-penn-microsofts-master-o...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>larsberg</author><text>The people making these campaigns may actually be ignorant. When I was at Microsoft (long, long ago), there were portions of some source trees that were covered by security or NDAs and nobody except for the very few people signed on (and builders) could look at or know about them. For example, when Intel had a new chip, the specific developers and testers working on them would be under NDA and the tree secured so that only they could see the work on the code generators until they were released. And that&amp;#x27;s just for NDAs - I can&amp;#x27;t imagine what happens for the code or infrastructure support required for the NSA. The only reason I knew about the chip stuff is I owned the source trees in DevDiv for a while.&lt;p&gt;So, it&amp;#x27;s entirely possible that the _entire_ Skype team except for a dev, tester, &amp;quot;security coordinator,&amp;quot; and one partner-level person were in the dark about this support and actually believed their marketing.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s still a terrible situation, but it&amp;#x27;s not necessarily hypocracy&amp;#x2F;lying&amp;#x2F;nasty on the part of the people making up the campaigns.</text></comment>
<story><title>How Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages</title><url>http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mtgx</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t get Microsoft. Are they really that hypocritical to the &lt;i&gt;core&lt;/i&gt; and so shameless? Why in the &lt;i&gt;world&lt;/i&gt; would they launch a &amp;quot;privacy&amp;quot; campaign against Google when they&amp;#x27;re in a &lt;i&gt;glass house&lt;/i&gt; themselves, and so vulnerable? Why the hell would they even put themselves on the spotlight like that?&lt;p&gt;Or are they really that comfortable with lying, that they have no problem attacking others over something, even though they are just as bad, or &lt;i&gt;worse&lt;/i&gt;(as this revelation seems to imply) Giving pre-encryption access to NSA? Really Microsoft?&lt;p&gt;To make things worse, they&amp;#x27;ve just put the guy who came up with that Scroogle crap in charge of their whole marketing department, so expect a lot more hypocritical&amp;#x2F;nasty stuff like that from Microsoft in the future:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-penn-microsofts-master-of-dark-political-arts-gets-a-boost-in-the-companys-new-reorg-2013-7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&amp;#x2F;mark-penn-microsofts-master-o...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>secabeen</author><text>Is there any information that the marketing department at MS was even aware of the PRISM program?  It&amp;#x27;s likely that that program was need-to-know, and anyone who did know couldn&amp;#x27;t stop MS marketing from doing a campaign based on privacy because that would be revealing a Top Secret program.</text></comment>