But the language and meaning of the slides are in question, not the authenticity. Only 4 (or is it 5 now?) slides have been shown. The language in the slides is imprecise, because they look like slides that were used for an overview of the program, to an audience that we don't know because we haven't seen the rest of the slides.

For God's sake, Facebook was spelled wrong, or rather, whoever put the slides together didn't even take the time to properly word-wrap things. So is it really beyond the realm of speculation that some of the key phrasing was off-the-cuff, in the way that PP slides often are because the presenter plans to elaborate during the actual presentation?

And if you're thinking: well, this is the NSA, surely an organization of their import would have a crack team of slide preparers who are at the top of their game in communication...well, as Edward Tufte would kindly point out, the top people in an organization can't be counted on to prepare accurate PowerPoint slides after a fucking space shuttle blows up: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

edit: made it clear that the language and assertions of the slides were in question, not the slides authenticity.

Google, Yahoo, and Facebook have directly denied that the NSA has direct access to their servers, despite what the slide deck says. The conclusion I've drawn from this is that the author of the slide deck was probably an idiot.

The author of the slide deck had successfully sold that solution to the NSA. I wouldn't hurry to call him an idiot.

In previous lives I've been on the vendor's side of way too many transactions with DoD to think that "selling something to NSA" is a high intellectual hurdle to clear.

But they are not the whole story. They cannot possibly be. They are proposing that they effectivly mirror the data of major Internet companies for a budget of 20 million dollars a year? There's obviously stuff being left out somewhere.

And we don't know those slides are legit. I could make that powerpoint in an afternoon. Hell, I make powerpoints all the time with proposals, examples, etc that I would never consider to be reference documents.

I think the assumption here is that PRISM is just the reporting front end that handles dissemination.

>I think the assumption here

That's my point. The assumption. The gaps we fill in for all the information we're missing. The fact that we have to assume means that questioning everything, from the slides authenticity to the leakers credibility is our duty as citizens.

...and the $20m budget. ;)