[infrec]

What do you mean by PRISM collaborators? I am genuinely curious because I feel like I missed when/where that was established.

To my understanding, and please correct me if I am wrong, PRISM isn't a system that companies subscribe to, but more of a government portal for requesting information from a number of companies in a legal fashion. Is this not correct? I admit I have not kept up with all of the bits of information released due to the high volume of speculations generated by just about everyone that talks about it.

[EthanHeilman]

We still don't really know what PRISM is or how it functions. It does appear that US companies did provide overly broad information to the US government using the following logic.

1. The US government gets massive amounts of information from these companies and can get this information in real time with no oversight,

2. none of these companies seem upset about it, which one imagines they would be if the US government was just stealing it without their permission,

3. and these companies have cooperated with the governments misinformation campaign (denials of "direct access" and such).

If they aren't responsible for initially giving them access, they are now responsible the governments continuing access since they have learned that the government does have access and they have not attempted to prevent the government from maintaining access and furthermore they have aided the government ability to maintain access by stifling public outcry about this access by lying to their users.