Microsoft accessed blogger’s Hotmail account to track leak

Microsoft Corp, which slammed rival Google Inc for reading customer emails to deliver ads, acknowledged yesterday that 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 owned Hotmail, said in a statement yesterday that the software company "took extraordinary actions in this case." He added, in future, Microsoft would consult an outside attorney who was a former judge to determine if a court order would have allowed such a search.

The case involved former employee Alex Kibkalo, a Russian national who worked for Microsoft as a software architect in Lebanon.

The FBI complaint alleging theft of trade secrets said, Microsoft identified Kibkalo in September 2012 after going through the Hotmail account of the blogger with whom Kibkalo allegedly shared proprietary Microsoft code. The blogger was not identified in the complaint filed Monday in federal court in Seattle.

"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," according to the complaint by FBI agent Armando Ramirez.

Meanwhile, the software giant made quick moves to address concerns caused by news it rummaged through a blogger's Hotmail inbox as part of an investigation into an employee's conduct.

According to commentators, Microsoft was well within its rights to check out on a blogging hack's private Hotmail account to identify an alleged Windows 8 leaker, which was in line with the terms and conditions attached to its Outlook.com and Hotmail services.

Microsoft has meanwhile, explained in a widely circulated statement by Frank that said,  ''We believe that Outlook and Hotmail email are and should be private. Today there has been coverage about a particular case.''

The statement says, henceforth, Microsoft would not look into anyone's inbox unless ''a legal team separate from the internal investigating team'' believed ''there is evidence of a crime that would be sufficient to justify a court order, if one were applicable.''

''As an additional step, as we go forward, we will then submit this evidence to an outside attorney who is a former federal judge. We will conduct such a search only if this former judge similarly concludes that there is evidence sufficient for a court order.''

The statement further stated, ''Even when such a search takes place, it is important that it be confined to the matter under investigation and not search for other information. We therefore will continue to ensure that the search itself is conducted in a proper manner, with supervision by counsel for this purpose.''

 ''Finally, we believe it is appropriate to ensure transparency of these types of searches, just as it is for searches that are conducted in response to governmental or court orders. We therefore will publish as part of our bi-annual transparency report the data on the number of these searches that have been conducted and the number of customer accounts that have been affected.''