Certainly true that there are a number of possibilities. The one that seems to make sense per Occam's Razor and the mass of evidence we now have is that Prism i

Certainly true that there are a number of possibilities. The one that seems to make sense per Occam's Razor and the mass of evidence we now have is that Prism is an NSA-side "facade pattern" against a set of company-specific FISA/NSL-compliance APIs. In NSA-speak this is "collection directly from the servers of $FOO" because there is no wiretap or other SIGINT or ELINT shenanigans. They ask, or the FISA Court compels by warrant, for a company to turn over information they have, the company sends it over electronically. Prism, on the NSA end, takes care to feed that information that is sent over to whichever analyst is working the case, patches up company-specific details so the analyst doesn't have to worry about it, etc. But they don't have feelers onto every datacenter owned by those 9 companies so there is no "direct access to data", as has been errorneously and loosely parroted around.