Google continue to deny, rather than explicitly explain why their name is mentioned as a partner in an internal NSA document. A remaining explanation that matc

Google continue to deny, rather than explicitly explain why their name is mentioned as a partner in an internal NSA document. A remaining explanation that matches all the known facts right now is that PRISM is a data format or data standard. It makes the process more efficient since it doesn't require the NSA to adapt disparate data sources from different web companies. One of the other slides mentions that this is a big problem for SIGINT at NSA. PRISM being a data standard would also explain why the program only cost the NSA $20M. The difference between the tech companies participating in the program would be how they implemented it - perhaps Google push the data to the NSA but it sounds like other participants let the NSA pull the data (or they store it on a third server which the NSA retrieves from - the lockbox). Also, saying that the requests are 'legal' isn't reassuring, since a large part of the recent NSA revenlations is the world finding out just what the Obama administration considers to be 'legal'. Legal means nothing more than finding a government lawyer who will write an opinion that blanket metadata requests or pulling or pushing data from Facebook and Google is legal. The opinion is classified, the court arguments are classified, there is only the government at the court and it is presented to a judge who is appointed by the government. Exact same thing happen with John Yoo and his legal opinion that the torture the government was carrying out was legal[1]. When the rest of the world found out just what the government considered legal, it very quickly became illegal. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_Memos http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_Memos