I think that you are broadly right. The government can already get access to Google, facebook etc so PRISM could be just a friendlier user interface around the

I think that you are broadly right. The government can already get access to Google, facebook etc so PRISM could be just a friendlier user interface around the whole process. So instead of: 1)investigate 2) get warrant 3) send warrant to companies with data request 4)companies send data back 5) repeat 3-4 until investigation complete PRISM allows an analyst to load up a warrant and start exploring data immediately without having to wait for the company to verify it and then do a ETL operation back to the NSA.