We know that PRISM is a system the NSA uses to gain access to the private communications of users of nine popular Internet services. We know that access is governed by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was enacted in 2008. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper tacitly admitted PRISM's existence in a blog post last Thursday. A classified PowerPoint presentation leaked by Edward Snowden states that PRISM enables "collection directly from the servers" of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and other online companies.
What do the Internet companies who allegedly participate in this program have to say about it?
In a Friday post titled "What the ...?" Google CEO Larry Page stated that "any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely false."
In a weekend follow-up, Google chief architect Yonatan Zunger wrote that "the only way in which Google reveals information about users are when we receive lawful, specific orders about individuals." He said that "it would have been challenging — not impossible, but definitely a major surprise — if something like this could have been done without my ever hearing of it." He said that even if he couldn't talk about such a program publicly, he would have quit Google rather than participate. "We didn't fight the Cold War just so we could rebuild the Stasi ourselves," he concluded.
"The notion that Yahoo! gives any federal agency vast or unfettered access to our users’ records is categorically false," wrote Yahoo's Ron Bell on Saturday. "Of the hundreds of millions of users we serve, an infinitesimal percentage will ever be the subject of a government data collection directive."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/12/heres-everything-we-know-about-prism-to-date/?utm_term=.9d5e80207ea8
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