PRISM doesn't involve data from US citizens' accounts. Please review what PRISM is before claiming it is illegal or unethical. It is neither.

If you are incapable of reading the documents yourself: if the company receiving the wiretap order has any reason to believe that an account belongs to a US citizen or a non-US citizen living in the US, they challenge the order. No warrant is needed in the US legal system or that of any other country in the world to wiretap a foreigner who is outside of the country requesting the data. The fact that the US requires a court order is rare, and by all accounts, including Snowden's documents, that procedure is followed.

How can you verify whether an account belongs to a US citizen without possessing a single bit of data about it?

> In case you've been living under a rock / off the grid and haven't seen the Twitter files recently, private companies not only aren't fighting back against government spying, censorship, etc - they're openly cooperating, going so far as to set up task forces to facilitate open cooperation. Why do you think Microsoft was feeding PRISM 5 years earlier than Apple?

There is so much you got wrong here, that it's hard to figure out where to begin.

1. Apple did not have any data to wiretap until people started using iCloud mail. Microsoft ran Hotmail since time immemorial. That's why they prioritized the integration of wiretap data from Microsoft first.

2. There are plenty of examples of companies challenging government orders that came from the Snowden leaks themselves. The Twitter thing is just that the government reported TOU violations to Twitter, and Twitter decided if they were violations and took action if so. The government did not have unilateral control over Twitter.

> It is followed in the letter of the law, not the spirit of the law, by a court that rubber stamps 99.97% of requests

What percent of warrants do you think are approved? You clearly have no idea how the world works. The government wouldn't waste its time asking for a court order unless it thinks the court order will be granted. If it wastes the judge's time by filing lots of requests that are illegal, the judge will punish the government for doing so.

I'm sorry, but you understand that if a tool necessitates a warrant to be used, it does not ensures that people can use the tool without a warrant?

"We've conducted an internal investigation proving no malfeaseance took place. We will not be releasing any data on our usage of the tool. Trust us."

That's the problem. They were bulk collecting all data going in/out of data centers, not specific named accounts. No way for a company to say "Hey, that account is an American citizen" when they are collecting all data indiscriminately.

> The leaked information came after the revelation that the FISA Court had been ordering a subsidiary of telecommunications company Verizon Communications to turn over logs tracking all of its customers' telephone calls to the NSA.

> That's the problem. They were bulk collecting all data going in/out of data centers, not specific named accounts

That's not what PRISM was. PRISM was a data integration project to ingest wiretap data from the FBI. That wiretap data came from court orders for specific accounts belonging to non-US citizens living outside the US.

I'm sorry but reading your posts here is just comical.

Can you explain why there are countless stories such as this:

NSA staff used spy tools on spouses, ex-lovers: watchdog https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveillance-watchdog...

You keep writing they were not spying on US citizens, but clearly they were or NSA employees would not be using it to spy on friends/family would they?

Did they coin the term "LOVEINT" because this was a one-off situation?

It sounds to me like that user is arguing in bad faith. We know that intelligence agencies attempt to influence online discussions about their own activities; it wouldn't surprise me to find out that they're being paid to post here as part of a US gov disinformation campaign to sway public opinion in favor of NSA. That or they've received all of their education on the subject by the perpetrators.

Either way, it's clear they're not coming from a place of promoting transparency or a critical perspective of the government's actions. There's nothing wrong with being a patriot but this is a conversion about government misbehavior, not a loyalty contest.

It's probably best to just ignore them, which is what I'll be doing going forward.

If you bothered to read your article, you would notice it said that they spied on foreign lovers outside the US. https://slate.com/technology/2013/09/loveint-how-nsa-spies-s... goes into more detail. One of them searched for the email addresses of an American girlfriend, but that search would have come up empty unless it was mentioned in an email from a foreigner outside the US being wiretapped.