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I'm struggling to make sense of all this. On the one hand, the denials from the companies in question are becoming more and more genuine and convincing - on the

I'm struggling to make sense of all this. On the one hand, the denials from the companies in question are becoming more and more genuine and convincing - on the other, the NSA PowerPoint did leak which very clearly states the companies' involvement and no one's thus far denied its validity. Who's lying?

Kylekramer 13y ago
Probably neither. It is just my guess, but it seems like the NSA slides overstate how much access they have (after all, this is a $20MM project) and the journalists took them at their word/pushed the sensational angle. The tech companies are understating how much they work with the government. No one is strictly lying, but their various interests are conflicting.
- eightyone 13y ago
  I have a hard time Glenn Greenwald would stake his reputation on this without having more concrete proof. I think that there is still a lot more information to be let out. They are slowly leaking more and more every day so that the story stays in the news. It's a clever tactic. I'm curious why Greenwald isn't going to release the "highly detailed technical materials on how they eavesdrop" that he claimed he had on Twitter. [1] Perhaps it would give up his source? Or maybe it just contains too much national security information or whatever? I'm not sure. [1] https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/343470800784982016 https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/343470800784982016 Ninja edit: Also as another commenter pointed out, that $20-million figure could be for just one specific part of the program or what have you.
  - mpyne 13y ago
    Uh, Glenn has said even more stupid stuff IMO in the context of the Pfc. Manning case so it wouldn't surprise me one bit. In fact I'd argue that Glenn's reputation is based more on being a "civil liberties watchdog" and far far less on actually being right in his reporting. So in that regard he's simply padding his rep even further.
    - eightyone 13y ago
      I'm not sure what Glenn said in regards to the Manning case, but wouldn't that be different because in this instance Glenn is the person who broke the story and has the source? He's casually mentioned on Twitter and in his articles that there's more information coming out. So I reckon we will see.
- pseut 13y ago
  "it seems like the NSA slides overstate how much access they have" This strikes me as pretty implausible; verifying the extent of their access to someone's gmail or facebook account seems like something the NSA should be able to do very easily. I think it's safe to assume that this part of the project is $20M, not that they have $20M worth of access to the internet.
icegreentea 13y ago
Potentially no one is lying, because even if the information in the slides were 100% accurate, they could describe a wide range of possible programs and implementations, many of which are also 100% inline with the companies' claims. For example, if PRISM is really just an internal NSA tool for interfacing, searching, storing etc information procured from these providers from different means (such as NSLs or FISA warrants), then obviously no company joined it. It's an internal tool! The idea of 'adding' just becomes ensuring normalization of data and other such 'mundane' things. Note I say, 'for example'. Because amongst all the yelling about, we still don't actually know what the fuck PRISM actually is, and arguments just revolve around how charitable/cynical you are about the parties involved.
- eob 13y ago
  The 20M project could well be a number of things not involving the companies direct participation * An interface to fuse data received by court order from each site. * A scraping tool to pull in open source data, possibly with seed accounts (i.e., a facebook account for each university) to give you better access. * Scraping data on the wire to and from each service, at the level of the internet backbone
  - n17r4m 13y ago
    This is also what I sort of assume. All of these tech companies like facebook, and google, probably got so many requests for info from the feds that at a certain point, it must have somehow made sense to switch it up and just give them an automated web form somewhere. (direct access to servers..) The telcos have probably had these since way back.. Eventually, there would be quite a few of these web forms, so some 'top' coders put together a system for the feds to query all of the forms at once with one request. Paint on a GUI and call it PRISM. It was nice to hear that Yahoo! still sorts out their fed requests by hand.
    - ampersandy 13y ago
      Facebook and Google (Zuck & Page) have also stated that each request for data is inspected individually. I don't know where you're getting that there's some automated system for pulling user data.
nostrademons 13y ago
Probably nobody. The most likely explanation is that PRISM = FISA. The Washington Post article with the slides begins "Through a top-secret program authorized by federal judges working under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)..." Now imagine how this works in practice. The FBI (not NSA, other articles have stated that the NSA works by handing a request off to the FBI to implement on domestic soil) comes to a tech company with a signed court order to hand over the user data for a user suspected of criminal actions. The tech company complies. The data is normalized and assembled on the NSA end, and then a realtime feed goes to the PRISM GUI where an analyst looks it over. At no point does the government ever reveal the name "PRISM" to the tech company - why would the NSA ever reveal top-secret codenames outside of the organization. When the program is made public, it's the NSA side of the story that hits the papers. The tech companies have never heard of PRISM, they know that the NSA does not have boxes inside their datacenters, and the whole accusation seems ludicrous. It's a mistake, when you find out that a secret has been kept from you, to assume that other people know about the secret as well, even if they were involved. The NSA is not in the business of telling businesses about confidential national security projects.
kahirsch 13y ago
> no one's thus far denied its validity. On Thursday, James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, wrote "The Guardian and The Washington Post articles refer to collection of communications pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. They contain numerous inaccuracies."[1] Today, he released a fact sheet[2] which stated, among other things, * PRISM is not an undisclosed collection or data mining program. It is an internal government computer system used to facilitate the government’s statutorily authorized collection of foreign intelligence information from electronic communication service providers under court supervision, as authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) (50 U.S.C. § 1881a). This authority was created by the Congress and has been widely known and publicly discussed since its inception in 2008. * Under Section 702 of FISA, the United States Government does not unilaterally obtain information from the servers of U.S. electronic communication service providers. All such information is obtained with FISA Court approval and with the knowledge of the provider based upon a written directive from the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence. In short, Section 702 facilitates the targeted acquisition of foreign intelligence information concerning foreign targets located outside the United States under court oversight. Service providers supply information to the Government when they are lawfully required to do so. * The Government cannot target anyone under the court-approved procedures for Section 702 collection unless there is an appropriate, and documented, foreign intelligence purpose for the acquisition (such as for the prevention of terrorism, hostile cyber activities, or nuclear proliferation) and the foreign target is reasonably believed to be outside the United States. We cannot target even foreign persons overseas without a valid foreign intelligence purpose. * In addition, Section 702 cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen, or any other U.S. person, or to intentionally target any person known to be in the United States. Likewise, Section 702 cannot be used to target a person outside the United States if the purpose is to acquire information from a person inside the United States. [1] http://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/191-press-releases-2013/869-dni-statement-on-activities-authorized-under-section-702-of-fisa http://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/191-pre... [2] http://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Facts%20on%20the%20Collection%20of%20Intelligence%20Pursuant%20to%20Section%20702.pdf http://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Facts%20on%20the%20Collec... For other statements from the DNI, see http://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases http://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases

Kylekramer 13y ago

Probably neither. It is just my guess, but it seems like the NSA slides overstate how much access they have (after all, this is a $20MM project) and the journalists took them at their word/pushed the sensational angle. The tech companies are understating how much they work with the government. No one is strictly lying, but their various interests are conflicting.

eightyone 13y ago
I have a hard time Glenn Greenwald would stake his reputation on this without having more concrete proof. I think that there is still a lot more information to be let out. They are slowly leaking more and more every day so that the story stays in the news. It's a clever tactic. I'm curious why Greenwald isn't going to release the "highly detailed technical materials on how they eavesdrop" that he claimed he had on Twitter. [1] Perhaps it would give up his source? Or maybe it just contains too much national security information or whatever? I'm not sure. [1] https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/343470800784982016 https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/343470800784982016 Ninja edit: Also as another commenter pointed out, that $20-million figure could be for just one specific part of the program or what have you.
- mpyne 13y ago
  Uh, Glenn has said even more stupid stuff IMO in the context of the Pfc. Manning case so it wouldn't surprise me one bit. In fact I'd argue that Glenn's reputation is based more on being a "civil liberties watchdog" and far far less on actually being right in his reporting. So in that regard he's simply padding his rep even further.
  - eightyone 13y ago
    I'm not sure what Glenn said in regards to the Manning case, but wouldn't that be different because in this instance Glenn is the person who broke the story and has the source? He's casually mentioned on Twitter and in his articles that there's more information coming out. So I reckon we will see.
pseut 13y ago
"it seems like the NSA slides overstate how much access they have" This strikes me as pretty implausible; verifying the extent of their access to someone's gmail or facebook account seems like something the NSA should be able to do very easily. I think it's safe to assume that this part of the project is $20M, not that they have $20M worth of access to the internet.

icegreentea 13y ago

Potentially no one is lying, because even if the information in the slides were 100% accurate, they could describe a wide range of possible programs and implementations, many of which are also 100% inline with the companies' claims. For example, if PRISM is really just an internal NSA tool for interfacing, searching, storing etc information procured from these providers from different means (such as NSLs or FISA warrants), then obviously no company joined it. It's an internal tool! The idea of 'adding' just becomes ensuring normalization of data and other such 'mundane' things. Note I say, 'for example'. Because amongst all the yelling about, we still don't actually know what the fuck PRISM actually is, and arguments just revolve around how charitable/cynical you are about the parties involved.

eob 13y ago
The 20M project could well be a number of things not involving the companies direct participation * An interface to fuse data received by court order from each site. * A scraping tool to pull in open source data, possibly with seed accounts (i.e., a facebook account for each university) to give you better access. * Scraping data on the wire to and from each service, at the level of the internet backbone
- n17r4m 13y ago
  This is also what I sort of assume. All of these tech companies like facebook, and google, probably got so many requests for info from the feds that at a certain point, it must have somehow made sense to switch it up and just give them an automated web form somewhere. (direct access to servers..) The telcos have probably had these since way back.. Eventually, there would be quite a few of these web forms, so some 'top' coders put together a system for the feds to query all of the forms at once with one request. Paint on a GUI and call it PRISM. It was nice to hear that Yahoo! still sorts out their fed requests by hand.
  - ampersandy 13y ago
    Facebook and Google (Zuck & Page) have also stated that each request for data is inspected individually. I don't know where you're getting that there's some automated system for pulling user data.

nostrademons 13y ago

Probably nobody. The most likely explanation is that PRISM = FISA. The Washington Post article with the slides begins "Through a top-secret program authorized by federal judges working under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)..." Now imagine how this works in practice. The FBI (not NSA, other articles have stated that the NSA works by handing a request off to the FBI to implement on domestic soil) comes to a tech company with a signed court order to hand over the user data for a user suspected of criminal actions. The tech company complies. The data is normalized and assembled on the NSA end, and then a realtime feed goes to the PRISM GUI where an analyst looks it over. At no point does the government ever reveal the name "PRISM" to the tech company - why would the NSA ever reveal top-secret codenames outside of the organization. When the program is made public, it's the NSA side of the story that hits the papers. The tech companies have never heard of PRISM, they know that the NSA does not have boxes inside their datacenters, and the whole accusation seems ludicrous. It's a mistake, when you find out that a secret has been kept from you, to assume that other people know about the secret as well, even if they were involved. The NSA is not in the business of telling businesses about confidential national security projects.

kahirsch 13y ago

> no one's thus far denied its validity. On Thursday, James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, wrote "The Guardian and The Washington Post articles refer to collection of communications pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. They contain numerous inaccuracies."[1] Today, he released a fact sheet[2] which stated, among other things, * PRISM is not an undisclosed collection or data mining program. It is an internal government computer system used to facilitate the government’s statutorily authorized collection of foreign intelligence information from electronic communication service providers under court supervision, as authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) (50 U.S.C. § 1881a). This authority was created by the Congress and has been widely known and publicly discussed since its inception in 2008. * Under Section 702 of FISA, the United States Government does not unilaterally obtain information from the servers of U.S. electronic communication service providers. All such information is obtained with FISA Court approval and with the knowledge of the provider based upon a written directive from the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence. In short, Section 702 facilitates the targeted acquisition of foreign intelligence information concerning foreign targets located outside the United States under court oversight. Service providers supply information to the Government when they are lawfully required to do so. * The Government cannot target anyone under the court-approved procedures for Section 702 collection unless there is an appropriate, and documented, foreign intelligence purpose for the acquisition (such as for the prevention of terrorism, hostile cyber activities, or nuclear proliferation) and the foreign target is reasonably believed to be outside the United States. We cannot target even foreign persons overseas without a valid foreign intelligence purpose. * In addition, Section 702 cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen, or any other U.S. person, or to intentionally target any person known to be in the United States. Likewise, Section 702 cannot be used to target a person outside the United States if the purpose is to acquire information from a person inside the United States. [1] http://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/191-press-releases-2013/869-dni-statement-on-activities-authorized-under-section-702-of-fisa http://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/191-pre... [2] http://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Facts%20on%20the%20Collection%20of%20Intelligence%20Pursuant%20to%20Section%20702.pdf http://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Facts%20on%20the%20Collec... For other statements from the DNI, see http://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases http://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases