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I don't think those slides are talking about court order related activities. After all, all companies must comply with court orders, so why would the NSA single

• lern_too_spel 13y ago
  As the companies have repeatedly explained and as the government's declassified documents show, it's because the companies built systems to automatically send new account data to the government for accounts under court-ordered surveillance as new IMs, emails, etc. came in. This contrasts with having an engineer manually send data dumps daily in some format the government has to figure out how to parse.
  • okasaki 13y ago
    I don't believe that's true. Much of the controversy centered around the (highly xenophobic) fact that the NSA was unable to guarantee that it wasn't scooping up data belonging to US citizens. If this was only about court ordered surveillence then surely it could have done so? And second, I specifically remember that all nine companies immediately denied the existence of the program. Then it became too big and it was time to "explain it"? As Bush Jr. would say, fool me once...
    • lern_too_spel 13y ago
      You're confusing different programs. PRISM in particular is only court-ordered surveillance of targeted users. That's what companies like Yahoo! participated in without knowing the NSA's code name for it. Limiting collection to non-Americans applies to bulk collection programs like the email header collection for unencrypted email deliveries crossing national borders and like this program. Those are programs the companies didn't know about and are understandably outraged about.