The US National Security Agency and FBI are tapping directly into the servers of nine major US internet companies to view connection logs as well as audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails and documents to track foreign targets, according to a document obtained by the Washington Post. The government's PRISM programme is focused on foreign communication traffic which flows through US servers.
The first participant in the Prism programme was Microsoft, which joined in 2007, followed by Yahoo in 2008, Google, Facebook and PalTalk in 2009, YouTube in 2010, Skype and AOL in 2011, and Apple in 2012. According to the document seen by the newspaper, 98 percent of Prism production is based on Yahoo, Google and Microsoft. The programme is based on the Protect America Act of 2007 and FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which gives immunity to companies that co-operate voluntarily with intelligence collection.
The director of national intelligence, James R Clapper, confirmed the existence of the programme, while saying there were unspecified inaccuracies in the Guardian and Washington Post reports about the information collection. Clapper added that the disclosure of information about the "important and entirely legal" programme was reprehensible and risked the security of Americans.
The American Civil Liberties Union’s deputy legal director, Jameel Jaffer, said the idea that PRISM was a court-approved programme was misleading as the court "meets in secret, allows only the government to appear before it, and publishes nearly none of its opinions".
Facebook chief security officer Joe Sullivan told the Washington Post that the company does not provide any government organisation with direct access to Facebook servers and it scrutinises any request about specific individuals for legal compliance. Apple also denied providing direct access to its servers, saying that any government agency requiring customer information needs a court order. Microsoft issued a similar statement, noting that if the government has such a voluntary programme, it doesn't participate in it.
People familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal that the NSA also receives a record of the location, number called, time of the call and length of the conversation every time customers of Verizon, AT&T and Sprint make a call. Former NSA officials said the NSA also gains access to information about e-mail and website visits from ISPs and that it has similar relationships with credit card providers.
