[heavyset_go]

PRISM absolutely was about tech companies sharing data with the government.

From the PRISM Wikipedia article[1]:

> The documents identified several technology companies as participants in the PRISM program, including Microsoft in 2007, Yahoo! in 2008, Google in 2009, Facebook in 2009, Paltalk in 2009, YouTube in 2010, AOL in 2011, Skype in 2011 and Apple in 2012.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#M...

[evgen]

"Participating" covers a broad range of activity when it comes to this program, and would include things like having a portal to provide the legally mandated info that must be returned upon proper presentation of a warrant. Is it really 'sharing data with the government' if the latter shows up with a properly executed warrant for the data?

[sneak]

PRISM data is obtained without a warrant, even for USians whose data is supposed to be protected by a warrant, because of a special secret interpretation of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) Section 702.

It's warrantless, and the court that decides whether or not it's legal is itself classified and unaccountable and almost never denies surveillance.

This abuse was cited by Ed Snowden as one of the reasons he came forward. It's a public law, but a secret interpretation by a secret court that cannot be challenged by the people to which it applies.

It's not inaccurate to describe it as a military coup, given that it allows the US intelligence community to surveil everyone in the legislature and judiciary.

[lern_too_spel]

Section 702 only allows them to request data from accounts that belong to foreigners outside the US, so no, it doesn't allow the US intelligence community to surveil everyone in the legislature and judiciary.

[tomschlick]

The slides on that page diagree. PRISM was/is a data collection project. The sources came from other projects like the diagrams show. Those dont show anything about cooperation, only collection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/...

[lern_too_spel]

The documents don't identity them as "participants." They only say when data from those company was ingested into PRISM, which is simply a data integration program between the NSA and the FBI. The FBI's Data Intercept Technology Unit is clearly labeled in the slides.

The government issues a Section 702 order for some account(s) data, the company reviews the request and denies it if the account appears to belong to somebody in the US or an American (both of which cannot have their data requested via a Section 702 order), and then sets up a forward to the FBI. PRISM then geta that data from the FBI and parses it into fields for various NSA databases. Again, this is very clearly drawn out in the system diagram slide that Snowden leaked.