Silicon Valley's response to PRISM (surveillance program)
Post by: zix
PRISM - A clandestine national security electronic surveillance program operated by United States National Security Agencies (NSA) since 2007.
And yes, the PRISM scandal is far, far from over. More and more information keeps leaking out, and the more gets out, the worse it gets. The companies involved have sent out official statements - often by mouth of their CEOs - and what's interesting is that not only are these official statements eerily similar to each other, using the same terms clearly designed by lawyers, they also directly contradict new reports from The New York Times. So, who is lying?
Let's compare the official statements from the companies involved. First, Google CEO Larry Page:
An Apple spokesperson told Reuters:
PalTalk told The Washington Post:
Then there's AOL:
And here's Yahoo:
Notice a few things? Yes, these statements all contain the same key words and phrasings, and if you truly believe all these companies would come up with this independently I have a palace to sell you. This looks like a coordinated marketing campaign, with a focus on three elements: we have not heard of PRISM, we only respond to court orders, no direct government access to our servers. Those three elements return in all official statements.
Now let's compare this to the most recent development, which comes courtesy of The New York Times. According to the latest report in the NYT, the US government contacted Silicon Valley's technology companies to demand easier ways to access the user data these companies hold. Except for Twitter, all of them complied.
The companies involved are legally obliged to comply to these court orders under FISA, and they include Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, AOL, Apple, and Paltalk. The talks and negotiations around this matter are all classified, and it's illegal for the people involved to discuss them - which explains why the companies involved deny they have any knowledge of PRISM. These talks are still ongoing, and now also include Intel and possibly other companies.
It gets much worse, though. According to the NYT report, at least two companies (but perhaps more) went above and beyond their obligations under the law, and altered their computer systems to make the process more efficient.
This means that the coordinated PR statements from Apple, Google, Facebook, and so on, are technically correct: they do not provide the government with direct access to their servers, and they only hand out data whenever it's part of a FISA order - and those orders are, in turn, classified and may not be discussed.
