NSA and FBI Directly Connected to Google, Facebook, and YouTube?

The American National Security Agency (NSA) and the FBI are directly connected to the main servers of nine leading internet companies, allowing investigators to browse emails, photographs, and other documents to track individuals and their contacts, The Washington Post reported.

The highly classified counterterrorism program PRISM had not been publicly known until now. An unnamed source from the U.S. government confirmed the existence of the program to Reuters.
The newspaper reports that global players from Silicon Valley are involved: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. This news was released on the same day as reports from the British newspaper The Guardian that the U.S. government is collecting recordings of phone calls from millions of Americans as part of the fight against terrorism.

A senior official from the U.S. administration stated that the information collected by the government surveillance program, which uses the servers of internet companies, pertains exclusively to non-Americans living outside the U.S. The law that allows data collection through this program does not permit targeting American citizens or individuals located in the U.S., the unnamed official said.

In statements released late last night, Google, Apple, Yahoo, and Facebook denied that the government had direct access to their main servers.

“We disclose user data to the government in accordance with the law, and we consider all such requests very carefully,” Google reported. “When Facebook receives a request for data or information about an individual, we carefully consider whether it complies with the law and provide information only to the extent required by law,” stated the company’s security director Joe Sullivan.

According to The Washington Post, the program was initiated in 2007 during the administration of former President Republican George W. Bush and significantly expanded under the current President Barack Obama. The newspaper claims to possess copies of slides about the Silicon Valley operation intended for senior analysts at the National Security Agency. These describe the new tool as the most fruitful source of information for the President’s daily briefing, in which data from PRISM was cited 1,477 times last year.

The Washington Post claims to have received copies of the PowerPoint presentation on PRISM and other materials from an intelligence officer who wanted to reveal what he considers a gross violation of privacy.