| All of the major tech companies have been on board for a long time (and that was years ago). I have read the Snowden leaks. This is one of those times when details matter, and in those details you are wrong. I wrote this previously[1] about Apple, but it applies here too: The problem is that PRISM has conflated two separate things, and it is unclear how much of that conflation occurred at the NSA and how much outside. Apple was (and is) compliant in the "release customer details with a court order" thing, which it seems is part of the PRISM data. However, there was a second part, where the NSA got bulk access to communications without a court order. It is unclear which companies were complicit in this part. We know Google wasn't (because the NSA slide decks show how they had to intercept Google's inter and intra-data center links which were unencrypted at the time - and Google undertook a crash program to fix that). Apple's statements are pretty clear: they say they only release information with a court order. That means they weren't complicit in bulk collection - but they may have been hacked at the time like Google was. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13517740 |
I did not see any evidence in the leaked documentation nor the reporting on those primary sources that the companies involved were complicit. If this evidence exists I would be very interested to know, but from Google's actions subsequent to the leaks it did not seem they agreed with the program or were complying with it, and instead took actions to oppose the program by encrypting their communications links internally, and indirectly by advocating encryption in public Internet protocols such as HTTP and SMTP.