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What part of the Snowden revelations showed that the US government has "direct access" to Facebook and Google data?

_iyig 6y ago
>The NSA's top-secret black budget, obtained from Snowden by The Washington Post, exposed the successes and failures of the 16 spy agencies comprising the U.S. intelligence community, and revealed that the NSA was paying U.S. private tech companies for clandestine access to their communications networks. >The NSA was shown to be secretly accessing Yahoo and Google data centers to collect information from hundreds of millions of account holders worldwide by tapping undersea cables using the MUSCULAR surveillance program. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Revelations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Revelations
- JoeSmithson 6y ago
  These two quotes refer to different things. The first refers to PRISM, which gives the US a privileged position as it involves companies bound by US law, however, all participating companies denied it involved direct access to their data. See the quotes in the wiki article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#Initial_public_statements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#I... From the slides; it appears it works by the agencies (via the FBI DITU) sending the cooperating company a selector (e.g. email address), and then those companies sending back the actual material (e.g. emails); https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/media/File:Prism-slide-7.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/media/File:Prism-slide-6.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/... From transparency reports it is clear that the receiving company can see how many selectors are coming in and how much data is being "exfiltrated" under this scheme (and it is roughly 10,000 targets). --- The second quote refers to a program of passive surveillance which - while probably the most underhand thing revealed by Snowden - did not rely on any privileged position of the US government, and could have been pulled off by an adversarial nation as well. It didn't rely on the cooperation of those companies, and in fact they were outraged by it and implemented encryption in an attempt to thwart it.

>The NSA's top-secret black budget, obtained from Snowden by The Washington Post, exposed the successes and failures of the 16 spy agencies comprising the U.S. intelligence community, and revealed that the NSA was paying U.S. private tech companies for clandestine access to their communications networks. >The NSA was shown to be secretly accessing Yahoo and Google data centers to collect information from hundreds of millions of account holders worldwide by tapping undersea cables using the MUSCULAR surveillance program. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Revelations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Revelations

JoeSmithson 6y ago
These two quotes refer to different things. The first refers to PRISM, which gives the US a privileged position as it involves companies bound by US law, however, all participating companies denied it involved direct access to their data. See the quotes in the wiki article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#Initial_public_statements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#I... From the slides; it appears it works by the agencies (via the FBI DITU) sending the cooperating company a selector (e.g. email address), and then those companies sending back the actual material (e.g. emails); https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/media/File:Prism-slide-7.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/media/File:Prism-slide-6.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/... From transparency reports it is clear that the receiving company can see how many selectors are coming in and how much data is being "exfiltrated" under this scheme (and it is roughly 10,000 targets). --- The second quote refers to a program of passive surveillance which - while probably the most underhand thing revealed by Snowden - did not rely on any privileged position of the US government, and could have been pulled off by an adversarial nation as well. It didn't rely on the cooperation of those companies, and in fact they were outraged by it and implemented encryption in an attempt to thwart it.