The NSA thriller continues, as this time a new publication reveals the relationship between the secret service and Microsoft's Skype service. The publication came from the authoritative newspaper New York Times and states that it has information from people who do not want to be named, for obvious reasons, that the Skype service has developed its own monitoring system before its acquisition by Microsoft in October 2011.
It seems that American intelligence agencies were demanding that all software companies work more closely with the NSA, which is why they asked many leading applications, such as Skype, to develop systems that would give them access through some kind of backdoor to all of their users' conversations.
The source claims that the NSA also demanded that they “control the process themselves” and, therefore, they completely skipped the process of contacting the parent company to request details on the user accounts they wanted. In short, they had—and have—direct access.
Thus, the Skype project was born. “Some of the people working within Skype” were asked to develop a hidden system that would allow the NSA to access conversations and user data at any time.
Skype officially joined the PRISM program on February 6, 2011, but the backdoor access system was there and working, more than half a year before its acquisition by Microsoft.
Interestingly, Microsoft refuses to comment on this publication, even though the company has repeatedly denied its involvement in the PRISM.
