NSA lawyer: tech companies knew about Prism eavesdropping program

The big tech companies knew about the NSA’s big data collection program, only the name Prism they may not have known, as it was an internal name. That’s what the NSA’s chief lawyer says, according to The Guardian.

Every company used to collect data as part of section 702 of the FISA regulations knew this was happening and helped, even if they had never heard of the name Prism. That was stated unequivocally by the top lawyer of the NSA, Rajesh De, during an interrogation with the US government by the country’s privacy watchdog on Wednesday. The Guardian describes his statements. Section 702 facilitates the collection of data from citizens outside the US, providing the legal basis for the controversial Prism program, whose existence was revealed through Snowden documents last year.

Not only would the monitoring program have been known by the internet companies themselves, but also the collection of upstream data via the internet backbones would have been done with the knowledge of the companies, the lawyer confirmed. “Collecting as part of the program was a mandatory legal process, which any company that had to comply with,” said Rajesh De. It is possible that companies did not know the name Prism, as this was an internally used term.

The statements are diametrically opposed to the attitude of the big tech companies such as Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Apple, after the unveiling of the Prism program. They denied knowing about and participating in the program. Some companies did this in veiled terms and denied knowing about ‘Prism’, for example. However, the companies said they were complying with approved data requests to give access to limited data. However, according to Prism’s documents, the program provided direct access to the tech giants’ servers to extract data from people outside the US. In the past year, the tech companies have mainly advocated for more transparency regarding data requests.