New evidence has surfaced on how Microsoft has aided the NSA in spying on people.

The latest leaks comes from the NSA’s Special Source Operations or SSO division, which has been described by Edward Snowden as the “crown jewel” of the agency.

According to reports, Microsoft helped the NSA to circumvent its encryption to address concerns that the agency would be unable to intercept web chats on the new Outlook.com portal; allowed the NSA to have pre-encryption stage access to email on Outlook.com, including Hotmail; worked with the FBI to allow NSA easier access to SkyDrive; worked with the FBI’s Data Intercept Unit to “understand” potential issues with a feature in Outlook.com that allows users to create email aliases; and in other aspects which led NSA to claim that PRISM is a “team” effort.

Microsoft has been unwavering in its stand that it only allows the government access to specific accounts or identifiers to comply with the government’s lawful demands.

“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.

But what does this new set of evidence mean for businesses?  Joining Kristin Feledy in this morning’s NewsDesk is SiliconANGLE Contributing Editor John Casaretto with his Breaking Analysis on how the government’s requests could affect small businesses.

“I think it’s a matter of the size of the target.  When you’re talking about Yahoo!, that’s a giant , when you’re talking about Microsoft and all these different companies, they’re giants and there’s a huge base of users,” Casaretto said. “This information that they want to get to comes from these broad spectrum of users.  Smaller companies can kind of stay outside of this at this point because they haven’t really grabbed that attention.”

Casaretto added, “For example, there’s a story yesterday that came out about a small ISP in Utah that basically has rejected a bunch of requests.  The head of that company says, ‘You know what? Until I see a lawful warrant then I reject all of these things. I refuse to comply.’  And they haven’t seen that action or anything form the justice department or any of those things at this point, but as you grow bigger and bigger, you become more of a target and I think that it’s largely unavoidable when you get to that scale.

“The smaller companies, again, I think that for the time being there’s really not much they can do except to act and perhaps seek some legal counsel on what they’re supposed to be doing in terms of complying with these legal measure and so forth.”

For more of Casaretto’s Breaking Analysis on NSAgate, checkout the NewsDesk video.