[wyck]

This was my initial assumption, that Prism referred to fiber optic prisms that are used to duplicate data with zero interference.

These can be installed at the trunk level with virtually no one knowing about it (maybe a couple of on site managers). They can handle massive data and pipe it directly to the NSA. The problem of course is you're dealing with raw data which isn't nearly as easy to work with then if you had direct access to internals.

These are already installed on every major backbone so I also don't see why they would bother to involve anyone, so there must be more to it.

ps. It would be nice if another whistleblower came out with the data on optic splitters and how the NSA uses them.