Microsoft’s reputation has taken a little bit of a beating of late, in the wake of a recent report by The Guardian that the company aided the NSA (National Security Agency) in bypassing its own encryption and intercepting users’ information. Now though, the company is figuratively fighting back, and has reached out to US Attorney General Eric Holder to personally intervene.

The firm wants Holder to help it share publicly more complete information about how the company handled national security requests for customer information. On the company’s blog, Brad Smith, the general counsel and executive VP of Legal and Corporate Affairs at Microsoft, complained that while the US Constitution guarantees its freedom to share more information with the public, the government was “stopping us.”

“For example, government lawyers have yet to respond to the petition we filed in court on June 19, seeking permission to publish the volume of national security requests we have received. We hope the Attorney General can step in to change this situation;” he elaborated.

Truth and allegations

Microsoft’s push for greater transparency is in no small amount an effort to save face and mitigate some of the damning allegations laid against it. These include a charge by The Guardian that the company had enabled the NSA to have easier access to information in Outlook and Hotmail based email, as well as data stored on SkyDrive, while making Skype video chat’s more accessible to PRISM as well.

In its blog post though, the company did make the effort to lay out, app by app, exactly to what extent it complied with requests for access. Throughout, Microsoft once again reiterated that it only complied with legal requests for particular information, and denied that it enabled blanket access to all users’ data. More specifically, the company also stated that it did not provide any government with direct access to emails or instant messages and only pulled and then provided the specific data mandated by the relevant legal demand.

It further stressed that if a government wanted customer data – including for national security purposes – it needed to follow applicable legal process, meaning it must serve the company with a court order for content or subpoena for account information.

Heart of the matter

However, the crux of the matter, and the reason for Microsoft’s most recent plea for help from the US Attorney General, emerges from this statement: “When we upgrade or update products, legal obligations may in some circumstances require that we maintain the ability to provide information in response to a law enforcement or national security request. There are aspects of this debate that we wish we were able to discuss more freely.  That’s why we’ve argued for additional transparency that would help everyone understand and debate these important issues.”

Its problem at the moment is that thus far, these pleas have not been responded to, leaving Microsoft in the unenviable position between its legal obligations to the government on one hand, and potential loss of trust from customers on the other.

To the point

Admittedly, we give Microsoft our fair share of grief when we feel it is merited, particularly over Windows 8 and more recently, over the Xbox One digital rights management debacle. However, on this issue, we have to support what the Redmond company is pushing for – namely greater transparency about the pressures placed on it by government in a bit to release information to the public.

Furthermore, while assertions have been made about the extent to which technology and social media companies have allegedly sold out their customers at the behest of intelligence agencies, we suspect that a healthy dose of scepticism on that count is called for as well.

The fact is that in IT, much like in espionage, things are seldom as simple as depicted by Mad Magazine’s Spy Vs Spy (black hat versus white hat participants); more often than not there are plenty of moral shades of grey in between. It is these that need to be brought to light.