PRISM
NSA mass surveillance program collecting data from major tech companies
PRISM is a classified NSA surveillance program that collects internet communications from major American technology companies. Its existence was revealed by Edward Snowden in June 2013 through documents published by The Guardian and The Washington Post. The program's disclosure confirmed what privacy advocates had warned about for years: the U.S. government was conducting mass surveillance of both foreign and domestic communications on a scale previously considered conspiratorial.
According to the leaked NSA slides, PRISM provided the agency with direct access to servers at nine major technology companies: Microsoft (since 2007), Yahoo (2008), Google (2009), Facebook (2009), PalTalk (2009), YouTube (2010), Skype (2011), AOL (2011), and Apple (2012). The NSA could collect stored communications including emails, chat logs, video calls, photos, file transfers, and social networking activity.
The legal framework for PRISM rested on Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which authorized the collection of foreign intelligence information from non-U.S. persons located outside the United States. However, the "incidental collection" loophole meant that enormous volumes of American citizens' communications were also swept up — a fact that NSA officials had minimized or denied in congressional testimony.
Before Snowden's disclosures, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee in March 2013 that the NSA did "not wittingly" collect data on millions of Americans. This statement was later acknowledged to be false. Clapper was never prosecuted for lying to Congress.
PRISM was just one component of a larger surveillance apparatus. Upstream collection programs like FAIRVIEW and STORMBREW tapped directly into fiber optic cables carrying internet traffic. XKeyscore provided analysts with a search interface across virtually all intercepted data. The full scope of NSA surveillance capabilities revealed by the Snowden documents transformed the global debate about privacy, security, and government power.