Econintersect: Google CE Larry page and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond issued a corporate blog posting today with a two word abbreviation of a three word expression of surprise (often stated as WTF).
The brief blog posting proclaims that, contrary to claims in articles in The Guardian, Google has not granted access of government agencies to their servers. The Guardian has published an article a few hours ago reporting that several tech firms they had contacted denied all knowledge that any access to their servers had been sought, say nothing of granted.
Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill broke the story yesterday (06 June 2013), reporting on a top secret document obtained by The Guardian. The document was a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation dated April 2013 that detailed the operation of the National Security Agency (NSA) with the name “Prism“.
Here is an excerpt from the Guardian article:
The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.
The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called Prism, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.
The Guardian has published images of some of the top secret slides. One of them indicates that dates when “Prism collection began for each provider” started in 2007 and three companies were being collected by January 2009 (Microsoft, Yahoo and Google).
Another slide published by The Guardian indicates what activities were being subjected to surveillance:
An NSA slide indicates that the cost of Prism is $20 million per year.
The Prism story broke on the heels of another scoop by Glenn Greenwald that the NSA was collecting millions of phone records from Verizon following the issuance of a court order to that effect in April.
Below is the first page of the court order:
PRODUCTION OF TANGIBLE THINGS FROM VERIZON BUSINESS NETWORK SERVICES, 15-80 INC. ON BEHALF OF MCI COMMUNICATION SERVICES, INC. D/B/A VERIZON BUSINESS SERVICES.
SECONDARY ORDER
This Court having found that the Application of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for an Order requiring the production of tangible things from Verizon Business Network Services, Inc. on behalf of MCI Communication Services Inc., d/b/a Verizon Business Services (individually and collectively “Verizon”) satisfies the requirements of 50 U.S.C. ? 1861, IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that, the Custodian of Records shall produce to the National Security Agency (NSA) upon service of this Order, and continue production
TOP SECRET//SI//NOFORN Derived from: Declassify on:
Pleadings in the above-captioned docket 12 April 2038
The full court document is available at The Guardian.
Friday afternoon (07 June 2013) President Obama held a press conference to explain the NSA programs. The following video was provided by The New York Times.
How did it all start? The 2007 date identified for Microsoft in the NSA slides is 9/11/2007. Timothy B. Lee (Washington Post) identifies that as the date that NSA signed up Microsoft to be its first partner for Prism. This was one of the first actions authorized under the Protect America Act of 2007, signed into law just the month before. The primary purpose of the legislation was to authorize the government to intercept communications which originated in one foreign country and ended in that or any other foreign country if the mssage at any time passed through the U.S.
According to the Washington Post:
Civil liberties groups warned that the PAA’s vague requirements and lack of oversight would give the government a green light to seek indiscriminate access to the private communications of Americans. They predicted that the government would claim that they needed unfettered access to domestic communications to be sure they had gotten all relevant information about suspected terrorists.
It now appears that this is exactly what the government did. Today’s report suggests that the moment the PAA was the law of the land, the NSA started using it to obtain unfettered access to the servers of the nation’s leading online services. To comply with the requirement that the government not target Americans, PRISM searches are reportedly “designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target’s ‘foreignness’” — the lowest conceivable standard. PRISM training materials reportedly instruct users that if searches happen to turn up the private information of Americans, “it’s nothing to worry about.”
Sources:
- What the … ? (Larry Page and David Drummond, Google Official Blog, 07 June 2013)
- NSA Prism program taps in to user data of Apple, Google and others (Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, The Guardian, 06 June 2013)
- PRISM scandal: tech giants flatly deny allowing NSA direct access to servers (Dominic Rushe and James Ball, The Guardian, 07 June 2013)
- Facebook and Google insist they did not know of Prism surveillance program (Dominic Rushe, The Guardian, 07 June 2013)
- NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily (Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian, 05 June 2013)
- How Congress unknowingly legalized PRISM in 2007 (Timothy B. Lee, The Washington Post)
