LOS ANGELES (AP) — Microsoft Corp., which has skewered
rival Google Inc. for going through customer emails to deliver ads,
acknowledged Thursday it had searched emails in a blogger’s Hotmail
account to track down who was leaking company secrets.
John Frank,
deputy general counsel for Microsoft, which owns Hotmail, said in a
statement Thursday that the software company "took extraordinary actions
in this case." In the future, he said, Microsoft would consult an
outside attorney who is a former judge to determine if a court order
would have allowed such a search.
The case involves former employee Alex Kibkalo, a Russian native who worked for Microsoft as a software
architect in Lebanon.
According
to an FBI complaint alleging theft of trade secrets, Microsoft found
Kibkalo in September 2012 after examining the Hotmail account of the
blogger with whom Kibkalo allegedly shared proprietary Microsoft code.
The complaint filed Monday in federal court in Seattle did not identify
the blogger.
"After confirmation that the data was Microsoft’s
proprietary trade secret, on September 7, 2012, Microsoft’s Office of
Legal Compliance (OLC) approved content pulls of the blogger’s Hotmail
account," says the complaint by FBI agent Armando Ramirez.
The
search of the email account occurred months before Microsoft provided
Ramirez with the results of its internal investigation in July 2013.
The
email search uncovered messages from Kibkalo to the blogger containing
fixes for the Windows 8 RT operating system before they were released
publicly. The complaint alleges Kibkalo also shared a software
development kit that could be used by hackers to understand more about
how Microsoft uses product keys to activate software.
Besides the
email search, Microsoft also combed through instant messages the two
exchanged that September. Microsoft also examined files in Kibkalo’s
cloud storage account, which until last month was called SkyDrive.
Kibkalo is accused of using SkyDrive to share files with the blogger.
Kibkalo has since relocated to Russia, the FBI complaint says.
Frank said in his statement that no court order was needed to conduct the searches.
"Courts
do not issue orders authorizing someone to search themselves," he said.
"Even when we have probable cause, it’s not feasible to ask a court to
order us to search ourselves."
Hotmail’s terms of service includes
a section that says, "We may access or disclose information about you,
including the content of your communications, in order to … protect
the rights or property of Microsoft or our customers."
Redmond,
Wash.-based Microsoft has taken a defiant stand against intrusions of
customer privacy, in the wake of National Security Agency systems
analyst Edward Snowden’s revelations of government snooping into online
activities.
General counsel Brad Smith said in a blog post in
December that Microsoft was "especially alarmed" at news reports of
widespread government cyber-spying.
Microsoft also has a
long-running negative ad campaign called "Scroogled," in which it slams
Google for scanning "every word in every email" to sell ads, saying that
"Google crosses the line."
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