http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data

What do you expect from a scion of the empire?

Least surprising headline so far this year.

Gaining notoriety via "borrowing" stuff that wasn't theirs.

http://venturebeat.com/2014/03/14/apple-cofounder-steve-wozniak-snowden-had-the-guts-and-courage-to-sacrifice-his-life/

... for Bill Gates. And his opinion is worth a bucket of warm spit IMHO.

has hated him at one time or another.

He did not create it.

He made some shrewd business moves for sure.

It's not like Bill Gates helped turn what was once a competitive and highly innovative industry into a monopolistic empire of his by bankrupting his rivals with frivolous lawsuits and producing crappy operating systems. No, everyone who hates Bill Gates is just jealous.

God, the hero worship some people have of assholes just because they make lots of money never ceases to amaze me.

NSA wrongdoing, but Snowden chose to violate law and released information that likely has resulted in people dying. Gate was clear that a vigorous debate must be had vis a vis security versus privacy, with baseline requirements being set in place to protect privacy.

Bill just shut his mouth and played along, all the while collecting his billions.

It's odd how so many people in our society seem to equate great wealth with superior reasoning, intellect, moral judgement, etc.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data

Another newsletter entry stated that NSA already had pre-encryption access to Outlook email. "For Prism collection against Hotmail, Live, and Outlook.com emails will be unaffected because Prism collects this data prior to encryption."

Microsoft's co-operation was not limited to Outlook.com. An entry dated 8 April 2013 describes how the company worked "for many months" with the FBI – which acts as the liaison between the intelligence agencies and Silicon Valley on Prism – to allow Prism access without separate authorization to its cloud storage service SkyDrive.

The document describes how this access "means that analysts will no longer have to make a special request to SSO for this – a process step that many analysts may not have known about".

The NSA explained that "this new capability will result in a much more complete and timely collection response". It continued: "This success is the result of the FBI working for many months with Microsoft to get this tasking and collection solution established."