[tokenadult]

Either the $20 million claim is wrong, and then all the information on the slides is suspect, or it is correct, and the scope of PRISM is much smaller than is widely believed and is believed by the author of this article.

Multiple replies below have already questioned this either-or choice you present. From what I know about government agency presentations to higher-level authorities who set budgets, the likely claim on the slide is that the marginal cost of PRISM-as-such in an environment in which NSA already has other programs and the facilities to run them is just an insubstantial $20 million. And on the more extravagant assumptions of the submitted article, that might very well be a true claim for a PRISM program that gathers and analyzes quite a lot of data. That's especially likely if NSA has low-cost in-house software development capabilities, as it surely does.

[ra]

It's funny, when I first saw the slide I assumed that $20mm was the anual fee for other intelligence organisations to gain access to PRISM.