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They have? I must've missed the announcement stating this about what Snowden told the world. Care to expand on it?

lern_too_spel 10y ago
Pretty much everybody in Silicon Valley knows how wrong Snowden was about PRISM. Unlike The Guardian, The New York Times interviewed actual engineers and got the story correct from the very beginning. Here is a competent explanation of how Snowden didn't understand that DITU is an FBI department and not a bulk collection system on internet companies' networks: https://medium.com/@alecmuffett/how-to-talk-about-prism-and-not-get-entirely-blown-off-if-youre-an-activist-e2a79d2cd2ad#.m6qaohems https://medium.com/@alecmuffett/how-to-talk-about-prism-and-...
- lostlogin 10y ago
  What? That doesn't say PRISM doesn't exist it says it does and suggests how it might be used ("I imagine"). It says the info is collected.
  - lern_too_spel 10y ago
    In particular, the information is collected by the FBI and is not bulk collection of all their data but targeted Section 702 collection of certain users' data, as I said above.
- vkou 10y ago
  I don't understand why you're being downvoted, considering this one fact: PRISM was ran on a budget of $200,000/year. This may be enough money to put together and maintain a sad-looking web portal that lets you make requests for user data against Google, Apple, and Yahoo's legal compliance departments. This is by no means enough to do bulk data collection for billions of users. (That was the domain of the other hundred-odd programs that the NSA runs.)
  - jessaustin 10y ago
    It's called the "black budget", and it's $50B/yr. Plenty of room there for PRISM. [EDIT:] Any "documentation" for that $200k "fact"? It smells strongly of an orifice, from which it perhaps was extracted?
    - vkou 10y ago
      Or, perhaps, we could apply Occam's razor, and assume that they don't have a single program (With no documentation besides 15 power-point slides) that mass-slurps all user information from 12 major IT companies... And instead, attribute that 50 billion budget to the other hundred-odd projects, all of which are targeted (This one attacks Google, this one attacks Apple, this one hosts >50% of TOR relays in the United States...) Edit: The PRISM slides themselves. [1] Ah - I was wrong by 2 orders of magnitude - it's 20M/year. Still chump change, compared to how much a broad surveillance project for all these companies would cost. Look at slide #7. It describes what PRISM does. Interfacing with APGOFAMS is a tiny portion of it. Given how government works, it's unsurprising that the vast majority of that $20 million/year is poured into the bottomless pit of middle managers who live in the upper part of the chart. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/nov/01/prism-slides-nsa-document https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/nov/01/pr...
    - lern_too_spel 10y ago
      The cost is $20 million per year. We know exactly what PRISM is and exactly how much it costs. The slides tell us: https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/nov/01/prism-slides-nsa-document https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/nov/01/pr.... The engineers who worked on the integration with the FBI have also told many of us who work in the Valley, and The New York Times had competent enough editorial staff to get the story right while The Guardian continued to spew nonsense: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies-bristling-concede-to-government-surveillance-efforts.html http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-compani.... In particular, we know that PRISM isn't "bulk data collection" as this article wrongly states.
- ionised 10y ago
  > Pretty much everybody in Silicon Valley Really? Do you have the numbers to back that up?

Pretty much everybody in Silicon Valley knows how wrong Snowden was about PRISM. Unlike The Guardian, The New York Times interviewed actual engineers and got the story correct from the very beginning. Here is a competent explanation of how Snowden didn't understand that DITU is an FBI department and not a bulk collection system on internet companies' networks: https://medium.com/@alecmuffett/how-to-talk-about-prism-and-not-get-entirely-blown-off-if-youre-an-activist-e2a79d2cd2ad#.m6qaohems https://medium.com/@alecmuffett/how-to-talk-about-prism-and-...

lostlogin 10y ago
What? That doesn't say PRISM doesn't exist it says it does and suggests how it might be used ("I imagine"). It says the info is collected.
- lern_too_spel 10y ago
  In particular, the information is collected by the FBI and is not bulk collection of all their data but targeted Section 702 collection of certain users' data, as I said above.
vkou 10y ago
I don't understand why you're being downvoted, considering this one fact: PRISM was ran on a budget of $200,000/year. This may be enough money to put together and maintain a sad-looking web portal that lets you make requests for user data against Google, Apple, and Yahoo's legal compliance departments. This is by no means enough to do bulk data collection for billions of users. (That was the domain of the other hundred-odd programs that the NSA runs.)
- jessaustin 10y ago
  It's called the "black budget", and it's $50B/yr. Plenty of room there for PRISM. [EDIT:] Any "documentation" for that $200k "fact"? It smells strongly of an orifice, from which it perhaps was extracted?
  - vkou 10y ago
    Or, perhaps, we could apply Occam's razor, and assume that they don't have a single program (With no documentation besides 15 power-point slides) that mass-slurps all user information from 12 major IT companies... And instead, attribute that 50 billion budget to the other hundred-odd projects, all of which are targeted (This one attacks Google, this one attacks Apple, this one hosts >50% of TOR relays in the United States...) Edit: The PRISM slides themselves. [1] Ah - I was wrong by 2 orders of magnitude - it's 20M/year. Still chump change, compared to how much a broad surveillance project for all these companies would cost. Look at slide #7. It describes what PRISM does. Interfacing with APGOFAMS is a tiny portion of it. Given how government works, it's unsurprising that the vast majority of that $20 million/year is poured into the bottomless pit of middle managers who live in the upper part of the chart. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/nov/01/prism-slides-nsa-document https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/nov/01/pr...
  - lern_too_spel 10y ago
    The cost is $20 million per year. We know exactly what PRISM is and exactly how much it costs. The slides tell us: https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/nov/01/prism-slides-nsa-document https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/nov/01/pr.... The engineers who worked on the integration with the FBI have also told many of us who work in the Valley, and The New York Times had competent enough editorial staff to get the story right while The Guardian continued to spew nonsense: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies-bristling-concede-to-government-surveillance-efforts.html http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-compani.... In particular, we know that PRISM isn't "bulk data collection" as this article wrongly states.
ionised 10y ago
> Pretty much everybody in Silicon Valley Really? Do you have the numbers to back that up?