> participated in the NSA PRISM program It is entirely unclear if they did. While the name of big companies (Google, Apple, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Dropbox, etc) g

> participated in the NSA PRISM program It is entirely unclear if they did. While the name of big companies (Google, Apple, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Dropbox, etc) got dragged through the mud, it only appears that these companies were responding to court orders and that "directly" in this context meant with cooperation of these companies and the courts. Companies are legally obligated to respond to valid court orders, issued from a normal court or secret court. See this slide[0], the fact that all data from those companies was going through the FBI instead of an NSA codename project, should tell you everything you need to know about the mechanism (i.e. legal, not technological). The PRISM program seems to primarily be about hooking into telecommunication infrastructure (both in the US and abroad). Telecommunications companies were definitely complicit. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/media/File:Prism-slide-7.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/...