What does "participation" in PRISM mean?

> Apple: "We have never heard of PRISM"[115] "We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer data must get a court order."[115]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%...

Certainly American companies are subjects to warrants and NSLs, but Google (to give one example) had its dark fibre connections between data centres tapped by the NSA. Is that the "participation" that was referred to by the Snowden documents?

* https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/new-docs-show-ns...

* https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/30/google-re...

* https://venturebeat.com/2013/11/25/level-3-google-yahoo/

* https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-i...

> had its dark fibre connections between data centres tapped by the NSA. Is that the "participation" that was referred to by the Snowden documents?

No, that's a separate thing. They do both. See the "you should use both" slide.

https://github.com/iamcryptoki/snowden-archive/blob/master/d...

As to the apple claims that they didn't participate in PRISM, I think they were just lying. Clapper lied to congress as well, so this isn't unheard of. They would likely have breached their government contract by telling the truth. That being said, them having never heard about the program name might be true because it might not have been known to them under that name, but that's just a detail.

Apple was not lying because “PRISM” was an internal source identifier at the NSA for the process of acquiring data through the FISA warrant process. Apple never heard the word PRISM; they got FISA warrants and replied to them as required by law.

This is clearly indicated on the PRISM Wikipedia page that was linked above.

> PRISM is a code name for a program under which the United States National Security Agency (NSA) collects internet communications from various U.S. internet companies.[1][2][3] The program is also known by the SIGAD US-984XN.[4][5] PRISM collects stored internet communications based on demands made to internet companies such as Google LLC under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to turn over any data that match court-approved search terms.

> Apple was not lying because “PRISM” was an internal source identifier at the NSA for the process of acquiring data through the FISA warrant process. Apple never heard the word PRISM

As I've said, that's a detail and splitting hairs. If a sentence has multiple interpretations and one of them is true, but you phrase it in a way that most people interpret the sentence in the wrong way, you are intentionally deceiving people. They should have said "we have never heard the name PRISM" or something like this.

I thought you just ended up in PRISM you don't "join" it? Just like Google found out from the Snowden leaks and then encrypted all their DC to DC fiber.

I think there were aspects of PRISM that required cooperation from providers like Google. Like the NSA would send queries to them and they would return emails or what have you that match those queries. Though of course this “cooperation” is required by law.

If there's a court order, (FISA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveilla..., or otherwise) companies have to comply. So I don't really see how one can blame a any company for that.

You can absolutely blame companies, specifically Apple, because many things are not E2EE when they could be.

See: the last sentence of my post