India approached US tech giant Microsoft with 418 requests last year, seeking information on user accounts as part of its investigation of criminal activities. The inquiries involved 594 user IDs.
As part of its disclosure on requests from Governments across the world, Microsoft has stated that it did not provide any content data to the Indian Government, but handed over non-content data on 370 of the requests (88.5 per cent). New Delhi also made 53 requests involving 101 accounts in respect of data from Skype, which Microsoft acquired in 2011.
The details are set out in Microsoft’s “law Enforcement Requests Report”, put out in March, in a reported push for already begun by the likes of Google and Twitter. Even so, tech majors, including Microsoft, Google, Apple, Yahoo and Facebook, have come under public scrutiny following whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations on the US National Security Agency’s far-reaching surveillance, including mining the web data by tapping the central servers of the Internet giants.
Dealing with law enforcement requests received from countries across the world, the Microsoft report says that worldwide, it received 70,665 requests, with the United States making as many as 11,073 requests, albeit second only to Turkey’s 11,434. They are followed by Britain (9,226 requests), France (8,603) and Germany (8,419). Amid the growing concerns triggered by Snowden’s revelations, Microsoft has now written to the US Attorney General for permission to publicly share more information on how it handles national security requests from various Governments.
“We believe the US Constitution guarantees our freedom to share more information with the public, yet the Government is stopping us,” Microsoft’s general counsel and executive vice president Brad Smith said in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder. “I’m writing to ask you to get involved personally in assessing the Constitutional issues raised by Microsoft and other companies that have repeatedly asked to share publicly more complete information about how we handle national security requests for customer information,” the letter said.
Microsoft’s new push follows a report in The Guardian which cited top-secret documents to say that the tech giant worked closely with the NSA to gain deep access into services such as email clients Outlook and Hotmail, Skydrive and Skype. Smith, however, denied the report.