Editor’s note: This article was first published in June 2013, on the day the PRISM surveillance story broke, so its open questions and unconfirmed details reflect that moment. The source of the leak, NSA contractor Edward Snowden, identified himself a few days later.
The NSA (National Security Agency) and the FBI are tapping into the central servers of the nine leading US tech companies, collecting phone records, photos, emails, audio and video chats, documents and more every day, according to the Washington Post, which has seen a top-secret document, as it reported earlier today.
According to the Post, this programme, which the White House defends and whose code name is PRISM, has been helping itself freely to the information stored on the servers of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple.
If the Washington Post is right, we are talking about the biggest case of mass espionage in history.
Shortly after the article came out, some of the tech giants began denying the report, according to Business Insider. First came Joe Sullivan, Facebook‘s chief security officer, who said he had no knowledge of the programme, let alone of any collaboration to hand over data in bulk to the government or government agencies. Facebook, he said, has only provided personal information about specific users when the government has asked for it, always following the procedures required by law and in accordance with applicable laws.
Apple also denied the report, saying it had never heard of PRISM and that the government cannot access its database without a court order. Later, Google also expressed some scepticism about the possibility.
But can the government access these giants’ servers without the companies’ consent? According to The Guardian, the newspaper has checked the reliability of its sources and the documents. So either the companies now denying it knew that the government was using their databases to gather information, or it was done without their consent. Either way, the report states that data has been collected from all nine companies named.
The programme, PRISM, has been running since 2007. There was no intention of making it public, and it collected data directly from the main US service providers, with or without their consent (still to be confirmed). In fact, a whistleblower from inside the government has said that what they are able to do is horrifying, claiming that they can collect absolutely everything about any internet user.
At this point, explanations will have to come in the next few days. This is a reminder that the internet may feel anonymous, but you are handing over more information than even your own family has about you. Worse still, all of that information is stored somewhere that someone has access to.
Featured image: Trevor Paglen, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
