Well, you can't prove a negative so I'm not sure there's anything Page can say.

But at the same time they can't all be right. NSA says it's getting data in some form from Google, Page says no direct access.

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle then... but where?

I don't know why we'd expect the truth to be in the middle. If the NSA document is genuine, the information the NSA is collecting from Google is part of a Top Secret program as described in the leaked internal document.

If that is true, why would we expect that Google officials would be able to make any public confirmation of the Top Secret program? And, given that, why, in that case, would we expect the truth to be "in the middle"?

Conversely, if the leaked document is not genuine, then I still don't see any basis for expecting the truth to be in the "middle" between the false document and the Google denial.

Did I miss some information? I only saw two slides. One that show the potential data accessible and one that show when the companies were added. It doesn't say exactly that they had access to everything. As far as we know PRISM can simply be there to centralize the information that the NSA got in legals ways. We do know that the government ask about 100 users account information each day to Google, we can guess that they do the same to every company on that list and they were all added to PRISM at the date you can find on the slides. I mean that slide contains one of the most important information that we currently have to guess the magnitude of PRISM, the budget. They only need 20 millions $ every years. True data mining is much more expensive than that.

I'm 100% with you. I don't know what Page could say, and I agree that it's extremely likely that the truth is somewhere in the middle, but damned if any of us have any ability to actually suss out what that is. It's very frustrating.

I just think it's important to not be entirely cynical here, and to keep in mind what such a statement might look like if it were being truthful. I don't know how much different it might be, which generally makes the statement only as good as Larry Page's word, and only then if he doesn't have a gun to his head.

The truth comes from the source that wasn't intended to be public.

> NSA says it's getting data in some form from Google, Page says no direct access.

Page says no direct access and not even legal access at that scale (verizon). He doesn't say they don't have any access -- in fact he says they comply within the bounds of law, but it's not at the Verizon scale.

I don't know how many of us served as officers in the military, but the requisite action in this situation is pretty clear. If one is interested in day to day security, speaking from a strictly tactical perspective:

You assume Google is giving the NSA information and act accordingly.

Doubts are like bothersome flies...

until they are crushed...

you will never be comfortable at your current position.

We obviously stil have a lot to learn about PRISM... But with that said, I have some conflicting instincts & feelings about all of this and the company responses.

On one hand, I would think a very-visible CEO of a major corp would keep their name off of a press release, if the press release was a lie that they were compelled to tell by the government.

On the other hand, I feel like each company's response and their use of the exact same terminology ("direct access", etc) feels like a wink and a nod.

I completely agree, and I don't know how to reconcile the two.

If I was going to go completely conspiracy-nutter, I'd say that Page has been kept out of the loop intentionally for plausible deniability, and the actual incursion happens at a much lower level, where the people involved are coerced into keeping their mouths shut. That way, the bigwigs get to tell what they think is the truth, the NSA gets their data, and nobody is the wiser.

Granted, I think that belongs more in the plot of a thriller novel than in this actual world we're living in, but given the revelations of the past couple of days, fiction doesn't seem that implausible.

This may not be PRISM, but wtf is this???

"A US government-mandated backdoor allowed China to hack into Gmail"

"In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access."

http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/01/23/schneier.google.hackin...

Schneier is a smart guy, but he provides no evidence, links, or conjecture of what this backdoor may be.

Maybe those hackers just used the regular tech support "back door", as in "SELECT * FROM gmail where email = '[email protected]'

> or they are participating voluntarily and are voluntarily lying, ... seems unlikely to me.

Their business is based on user's data. If you do not feel comfortable giving them your data, it might hurt their business. Hence, IMHO, they do have some incentive to deny PRISM, regardless of the facts.

Or the news organizations summarizing the leaked slides got it wrong.