I am surprised, nobody has referenced the two recent articles from The
Guardian" and the Washington Post.
The article in the Guardian starts with:
The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of
Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top
secret document obtained by the Guardian.
The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called Prism,
which allows officials to collect material including search history, the
content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.
The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide
PowerPoint presentation – classified as top secret with no distribution to
foreign allies – which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives
on the capabilities of the program.
It later describes Prism in these terms:
The Prism program allows the NSA, the world's largest surveillance
organisation, to obtain targeted communications without having to request
them from the service providers and without having to obtain individual court
orders.
With this program, the NSA is able to reach directly into the servers of the
participating companies and obtain both stored communications as well as
perform real-time collection on targeted users.
Here are some short quotations from the Washington Post:
The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the
central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and
video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable
analysts to track foreign targets
the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document:
“Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers:
Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”
PalTalk, although much smaller, has hosted traffic of substantial
intelligence interest during the Arab Spring and in the ongoing Syrian civil
war. Dropbox, the cloud storage and synchronization service, is described as
“coming soon.”
In four new orders, which remain classified, the court defined massive data
sets as “facilities”
According to the slides and other supporting materials obtained by The Post,
“NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM” as its leading source of raw
material
In exchange for immunity from lawsuits, companies such as Yahoo and AOL are
obliged to accept a “directive” from the attorney general and the
director of national intelligence to open their servers to the FBI’s Data
Intercept Technology Unit, which handles liaison to U.S. companies from the
NSA. In 2008, Congress gave the Justice Department authority for a secret
order from the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Court to compel a reluctant
company “to comply.”
There has been “continued exponential growth in tasking to Facebook and
Skype,” according to the PRISM slides.
The Guardian is, here, more precise:
In the document, the NSA hails the Prism program as "one of the most
valuable, unique and productive accesses for NSA".
It boasts of what it calls "strong growth" in its use of the Prism program to
obtain communications. The document highlights the number of obtained
communications increased in 2012 by 248% for Skype – leading the notes to
remark there was "exponential growth in Skype reporting; looks like the word
is getting out about our capability against Skype". There was also a 131%
increase in requests for Facebook data, and 63% for Google.
Back to the Washington Post:
According to a separate “User’s Guide for PRISM Skype Collection,” that
service can be monitored for audio when one end of the call is a conventional
telephone and for any combination of “audio, video, chat, and file
transfers” when Skype users connect by computer alone. Google’s offerings
include Gmail, voice and video chat, Google Drive files, photo libraries, and
live surveillance of search terms.
“They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer
said.
