Watch this video from the Washington Post reporter who broke the story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-in

Watch this video from the Washington Post reporter who broke the story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence... a) "We did hold back quite a bit from this story." "There are some things that we looked at on our own, and said we're not going to publish that, and there are other things we talked to the government about." What does that mean? We saw three slides of a very limited nature. b) "This source believes that exposure was inevitable and is prepared to face that consequence." "He thinks what the NSA is doing exceeds all reasonable boundaries of privacy or necessity." This wasn't over mundane FISA court ordered data releases. c) In response to the question, "Why do these companies authorize this?" Response: "There is a pretty complicated set of incentives and compulsions. The law does provide that they can give access and a secret surveillance court can make them give access, but in a situation that you have a clandestine program and a very rich and powerful component ... They don't want to litigate this with Facebook, they don't want a chance of it leaking ... Facebook also being a highly regulated industry, having all kinds of issues with privacy and whatever else doesn't want to antagonize the government, so they negotiate it. Now Apple took .. 5 years .. I don't know what happened, but Microsoft joined in 2007 and Apple didn't do it until the end of 2012." So, the author, who saw all of the slides and talked to the source says that they they left great amounts out of the story, but absolutely confirms & goes in to detail that the companies were complicit with the NSA and that it went beyond what the legally mandated options. If the denials issued by Facebook, Google, and their respective executives are not an outright lies, and this story is not a hoax (I am assuming it is real since Obama had an opportunity to deny its existence) then there is a compromise in the traffic streams entering and exiting these services provider's platforms, very possibly like the infamous AT&T Room 641A. This may be more disturbing than we initially believed.