• Snowden hailed as hero in China

Both Sweden-based Skype and U.S. software giant Microsoft cooperated with U.S. spy agencies to give away the content of email and video chats, according to top-secret documents obtained by the Guardian.

The files provided by Edward Snowden illustrate the scale of co-operation between Silicon Valley and the intelligence agencies over the last three years. Though it’s unclear whether the collection of this data was indiscriminate or targeted at specific subjects, the language of the documents indicate that the NSA may not have needed an individual warrant for each request.

“Collaborative teamwork was the key to the successful addition of another provider to the Prism system,” the documents read. “This success is the result of the FBI working for many months with Microsoft to get this tasking and collection solution established.”

Skype’s privacy policy states: “Skype is committed to respecting your privacy and the confidentiality of your personal data, traffic data and communications content.” But internal NSA newsletters, marked top secret, suggest the co-operation between the intelligence community and the companies is deep and ongoing, the Guardian said.

“When we upgrade or update products we aren’t absolved from the need to comply with existing or future lawful demands”, Microsoft said in a statement The company reiterated its argument that it provides customer data “only in response to government demands and we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers”.

Skype was founded in 2003 by Janus Friis from Denmark and Niklas Zennström from Sweden. It was bought by Microsoft in 2011 for $8.5 billion.