Microsoft Share Price: Company Denies Giving NSA Encryption Keys

iNVEZZ.com Wednesday, July 17th: Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) today denied recent allegations that it had granted U.S. intelligence agencies the ability to break its encryption and access user data.

The software giant has joined Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Apple and others in putting pressure on the government to be more transparent about its surveillance programmes. In a letter today to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, Microsoft asked for permission to share more information on its communication with the National Security Agency (NSA), saying it has a constitutional right to do so.

Microsoft said that while it is limited in what it can disclose about its communication with NSA, the company doesn’t grant access to servers and only provides governments with specific information about requests. “We do not provide any government with the ability to break the encryption, nor do we provide the government with the encryption keys,” Microsoft’s General Counsel Brad Smith said in a blog post today, as quoted by Bloomberg. “When we are legally obligated to comply with demands, we pull the specified content from our servers where it sits in an unencrypted state, and then we provide it to the

government agency.”
!m[Analysts Expect Rise in Microsoft’s Q4 Profit ](/uploads/story/4082/thumbs/pic1_inline.png)
**Q4 Earnings Preview**
Microsoft is scheduled to release its quarterly results after the closing bell in New York tomorrow. According to Reuters estimates, the company is expected to report fourth-quarter earnings per share of 75 cents on revenue of $20.79 billion, compared to a profit of 67 cents a share on revenue of $18.06 billion in the year-ago period.
**The Microsoft share price, which has gained almost 38 percent in the year to date, rose 0.3 percent yesterday, closing the New York trading session at $36.27.**

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