content: It is not just Microsoft. All of them are required, by law, to give it up.  True. If they CAN spy over their users, they will be demanded to hand over the data.  The trick is to make tools that make the whole spying thing useless. If you don't know something, then you can't comply with silly requests. The problem here is that Skype was a quite secure protocol before Microsoft touched it. With its P2P structure there was no central point of failure... Microsoft purposely broke it to allow spying.