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by humanspecies
4754 days ago
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The leaked slides say clearly the government can query the servers at will. They get real time login data, logout data and payload data. I don't know why people keep putting this into question, giving Google the benefit of the doubt, when they were caught pants down, no questions asked. If the companies mentioned in the slides just complied with the law, why would they be singled out in those slides? Honoring search warrants and FISA requests is an obligation, not an extra. The reason Google was singled out as a partner since 2009 is because they gave the government full unrestricted access. |
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Which part of the PRISM slides make you think that? They certainly indicate pretty much full access to accounts which have been OK'd by Google (at least in archive form), but that is very different from 'full unrestricted access' to servers. I'd say we don't really know the extent of it, and welcome Google's decision to try to challenge the government in court to reveal more details.
As far as I read them the few PRISM slides we've seen don't really indicate:
1) The extent of access (how many accounts, how many accounts per order etc) 2) The mechanisms for FISA access 3) Any time delay in receiving documents/access 4) Whether data is realtime or not after access is granted
and the figures that FB, MS, Apple have announced hardly constitute full unrestricted access to all accounts as you seem to be implying. It's still a serious invasion of privacy, there are serious doubts about the efficacy of the FISA court supervision, and for foreigners I'm not even sure there are any protections at all (the NSA might not even feel obliged to get specific permission for non-US communications), so for everyone outside the US this is really invasive, but I'm not sure I can agree with your characterisation of these slides as showing full access (full access to what, to all Google servers, seriously?).