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The PRISM Details Matter
On “directly”, “unilaterally”, and the difference between a bombshell and a yawn of a storyhttps://medium.com/prism-truth/82a1791c94d3
Glenn Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill’s account of the NSA’s “PRISM” program in The Guardian is woefully short on technical details of how the program works. This lack of clarity should be troublesome to those attempting to decide whether they should be outraged. Does this program allow the government to look at private communications on a company’s central servers without a valid court order, or is it something more benign?
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Words have meaning, and the ones chosen here paint a grave picture. If the NSA has direct and unilateral access to anything it likes on the company’s servers, then this story is a bombshell, it deserves all the attention it is getting, and the vehement denials of direct access that the implicated companies have made are falsehoods. If these claims are true, people should be furiously angry both with the US government and with the implicated companies.
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The kind of access described in these accounts is both indirect and moderated in that the government only has access to a subset of data about FISA warrant-specified targets, and this data is not gathered unilaterally, but only after company lawyers have reviewed and approved the request. In this case, the company is obligated by law to turn the data over. The only choice they have is how they do it. The New York Times and the NSA claim that PRISM is merely a more efficient way of getting legally-required information from the company’s central servers to a place where the government can access it. But that’s not a bombshell — that’s a yawn. This would just mean that tech companies whose very mission is to create informational efficiency have coöperated with a technical program that streamlines compliance with legal court orders.
If that banal implementation detail is in fact the whole truth of the program, why would Greenwald and MacAskill have alleged direct and unilateral access? When challenged on Twitter, Greenwald replied “Our story is 100% accurate and not a comma has been or will be changed.” He seemed to be sticking by his account. Another time, when challenged, he pointed to a fifth PowerPoint slide posted by The Guardian.
