In an official blog post published on Tuesday, software giant Microsoft urged the US attorney general, Eric Holder, to "personally take action" towards approving the sharing of more information on how the company handles customer data requests that it receives from the national security agencies.

Calling on Holder to lift the government's block on public information sharing by Microsoft as well as other companies, Microsoft's general counsel Brad Smith said in the blog post that government officials had apparently failed to respond to the companies' requests for permission to publicly share more details on the number of national security queries received by them.

Microsoft said that even though the US constitution guarantees the companies the freedom to share more information with the public, the government officials were stopping them from doing so.

Microsoft's move to push Holder to allow companies to share more information related to customer data queries comes after The Guardian - drawing attention to the documents obtained by whistleblower Edward Snowden - published details of the extent to which Microsoft co-operates with the National Security Agency (NSA) while handling customer data requests from the agency.

Noting that the interpretations of media's last-week-reported leaked government documents contained "significant inaccuracies," Microsoft said: "We have asked the government again for permission to discuss the issues raised by these new documents, and our request was denied by government lawyers."