There's definitely some extreme speculation going on--both from those trying to maximize as well as those trying to minimize this issue. It will take some time to get to the truth. This article is a perfect example of an extreme attempt to minimize this issue.
This article seeks to minimize the Guardian's original story by saying the Guardian is "walking back" their claims. That doesn't seem to be the case. This article cites a paragraph near the end of a minor story published days later as the passage where they "walk back" their original story. The intent of the paragraph seems to be to illustrate that both the "direct access" claim from the NSA and the "no direct access" claims from tech companies can both be true. The original article doesn't seem to be changed.
Beyond that, the Guardian never claimed the NSA had "direct access". They claimed that the NSA slides stated the NSA had direct access. The Guardian has not stated they read too much into "direct access" in the slides, and the original article is pretty clear that "direct access" is simply the NSA claim in the slides, not the Guardian's verdict.
There is another remaining issue: the original article claims access to "live communications", which has yet to be supported by a slide, but it would pretty much rule out the SFTP-only possibility that some people seem to be accepting as fact at this point. Maybe there is direct access to live information from Skype and Apple, but Google insisted on SFTP? We still have a lot to find out.
It could be that the Guardian did exaggerate. But it is far too early to conclude that with so many questions remaining. Not all the companies have described their systems.
One thing is certain: the Guardian does not seem to be walking back their claim.
This separate article covers the story that the original article broke. This paragraph in the article gives an attempt to reconcile the competing claims from the NSA and the companies. What makes you say this attempt should invalidate the original story?
> When the FAA was first enacted, defenders of the statute argued that a significant check on abuse would be the NSA's inability to obtain electronic communications without the consent of the telecom and internet companies that control the data. But the Prism program renders that consent unnecessary, as it allows the agency to directly and unilaterally seize the communications off the companies' servers.
As soon as people suggested that "collection directly from the servers" actually meant a FISA workflow-automation system involving an API and maybe dropbox servers, Glenn Greenwald indignantly denied, or maybe didn't understand, the possibility that the companies' statements could actually be compatible with the PRISM document https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/343421926057861121 https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/343422182589870081 https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/343423399609131008 https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/343423727066824705 . Meanwhile both the Washington Post and the Guardian started backing down from the NSA-has-root idea. The paragraph WaPo added to its original story
> It is possible that the conflict between the PRISM slides and the company spokesmen is the result of imprecision on the part of the NSA author. In another classified report obtained by The Post, the arrangement is described as allowing “collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations,” rather than directly to company servers.
plus the later story it printed http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-com... both help to make clear that the Post did intend its original PRISM story to be understood as NSA-has-root.
"But the Prism program renders that consent unnecessary, as it allows the agency to directly and unilaterally seize the communications off the companies' servers" is a strong statement. I agree that it is probably not compatible with the details Google has divulged about its "SFTP and manually by human only" process. But that is only one of the many companies.
I understand the "slides or GTFO" attitude that I'm seeing in these claims that the original story is inaccurate, but I think it's a bit arrogant and premature. A journalist who has seen the entire slide deck continues to tell us that the nature of what the whole presentation reveals is more invasive than a digital lockbox with workflow management software where humans meaningfully verify, evaluate, and approve requests. He could have misinterpreted the slides, but I doubt he would stick to the report so steadfastly once all these objections arose if he were not pretty confident he understood the claims in the Prism presentation.
We shouldn't accept that the NSA can grab a user profile without explicit, individual legal approval from the company as fact yet--there's a lot more we will hopefully learn. And how true this is could vary from company to company. But it's silly to ignore that a credible voice who has seen the presentation is telling us something.
One is that AFAIK the Guardian and the WaPo both have access to all the same materials Greenwald has, and they have both been backing away from the NSA-has-root claim for some time. But an even bigger factor is how Greenwald defended his claim. If he'd said "there's still-unreleased material which proves me right, hold tight" that would be one thing. But instead he quoted the "collection directly from the servers" text and linked the new slide it came from, implying that the quotation unambiguously ruled out the drop-box/API interpretation and supported the NSA-has-root interpretation. But in fact "collection directly from the servers" is not at all unambiguous between the two interpretations. And even worse, the You Should Use Both slide, which Greenwald produced as his trump card, provides context which clearly undermines the NSA-has-root interpretation! In that slide it's clear that "collection directly from the servers" is being contrasted with upstream collection of IP data from the telcos. The fact that Greenwald evidently didn't pick up on this himself is pretty clear evidence that his understanding of the presentation is imperfect, whether because it's being distorted by his desire for a bigger and more damning scoop or just impeded by a lack of technical savvy.
The truth that has spread around the world is that there is a surveillance system in the US which spies on Americans.
If you feel journalists have misinterpreted the capabilities of the system, feel free to call the PRISM hotline for clarification and tell us what you find out.
"The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian."
They're not any less guilty than other papers, though. "Categorical statement, according to Source" is a common construct in journalism. But I don't like it, because it de-emphasizes the uncertainty in the statement. Reversing the phrases would put the correct emphasis, I think.
I suppose you could say that some of the statements are speculative in that they say "if the claims in the Prism presentation are true, then...", but I think that's speculative in a very narrow way. It makes sense to draw out possible consequences of the program as expressed in the source material that are rooted in fact and not in speculation.
The article is definitely not speculative in the dangerous sense; it does not say things like "direct access probably means root access to production servers" or "since this program costs only $20 million it's likely to keep growing".
It does make claims we have not yet seen evidence for, but there's no indication they're speculative...
http://media.hotair.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/prism-...
This is not a reasonable position for anyone with a technical background. Because anyone with such a background should surely realize that the two statements are not mutually exclusive, and there are plenty of ways for data to be collected which the NSA might reasonable categorize as "direct" while leaving Google with plausible grounds to categorize as "indirect" or otherwise deny knowledge of.
And let's go back to a quote in this article, which seems to have been edited since I originally read it: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-com...
“The server is controlled by the FBI,” an official with one of the companies said. “We do not offer a download feature from our server.”
Well. Now what?
It's easy to see how this sentence, in light of the entire "dropbox" thing, means that NSA grabs data directly from the "dropbox" set up and operated by the company.
There is ambiguity and room for interpretation in almost all language, especially the vagueness of a Powerpoint presentation.
the "direct collection" is a part of "FAA702 operations". The FAA702 is unrestricted collection of data of "non-USPER"sons, and in particular no individualized FISC orders required.
Now there is a choice - either Google combs their data, decides who is FAA 702 "eligible" and of interest to NSA and dumps the "non-USPER" data it has identified to the "dropbox" or the NSA does the combing/identifications itself (and if NSA does the combing - where it does it? on NSA servers attached to Google datacenters or does it transfer all data to NSA datacenter and combs it there?). What do you think NSA has chosen?
doesn't sound like it. 2nd slide:
http://www.aclu.org/files/pdfs/natsec/faafoia20101129/FAAFBI...
500K pales in comparison with all the tens (or even hundred) of millions in this _one_ FISC order
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/veri...
Again, for FAA 702 collection no individualized FISC required. 1 order for the whole Facebook, 1 order for whole Google, ... it seems that NSA does really need that server farm in Uta.
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/veri....
> Again, for FAA 702 collection no individualized FISC required.
That's not a FAA 702 order though. In fact it's in a different category to all the 70* orders, which fall under the "electronic survellance and/or physical searches" category in the https://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/fisa/2012rept.pdf annual report. The Verizon order would be a FAA 501 order, though people only ever seem to refer to it as a 50 USC § 1861 order. They're the "Applications for Access to Certain Business Records (Including the Production of Tangible Things)" on the annual report. These orders seem to be intended for things like the Verizon metadata, which it seems (IANAL) are considered to be unprotected by the probable-cause requirement even for USPERS. So I presume a 501 order couldn't be used to grab users' full private data from Google. In any case Google has denied that it has ever complied with http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/google-uses-secure-... (or even been served http://googleblog.blogspot.ie/2013/06/what.html ) any order nearly as broad as the Verizon one, and Facebook and MS have more or less followed suit.
http://www.dailydot.com/news/us-immigration-german-au-pair-f...
This seems to be the entire issue to me with PRISM - whether it's an unprecedented level of access or merely a statement of what has known to have been going on, and what was covered under FISA, for years, but just in a more technically expedient manner.
http://media.hotair.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/prism-...
Especially given the fact that the leaked documents specifically encourage analysts to use a range of tools (i.e. "You should use both"), he has no technical grounds for suggesting that such a minor semantic debate (between NSA and Google) discredits the claims of multiple people with first-hand experience of the NSA who are coming forward with claims of its abuse of power.
That deck was put together by a mid- to low-level government program manager who owned the program. He is playing politics, making his program sound like the most awesome thing EVAR so he gets promoted. It's not an "official" document, despite all the fancy markings.
You cannot interpret every word as gospel.
The interpretation wasn't extreme, it was literal. What it looks like is that the NSA claimed to have direct access while the denials that have been make it seem like they indeed might not have it.
The thing is that the NSA said they had this kind of power to someone, in a power-point presentation. They have said that they wanted it. And the regime of secrecy today makes it extremely difficult to determine for certain what they do and don't have.
I mean, if the NSA director was being truthful to congress in saying they weren't systematically spying, he's being very coy now when confronted with apparently contradictory evidence. Possibly, like many secret bureaucracies, the NSA was as wedded to telling someone, likely a high official, that they were ubber-powerful, and were by the token, attached getting the direct access even if they indeed currently lack it.
I mean, I think the NSA is discovering the weakness of secret approaches - that it makes all denials and all limits implausible. Hopefully, this will force a situation where all the "secret laws" and such get done away with.
The exact quote is "Collection directly from the servers of..."
This - depending on say, the context and narration, can mean any number of things and considering the intended audience and what PRISM actually is, would've meant "we collect this data that's stored on Google's servers" rather then perhaps "we seize individual computers" or wiretap the information some other way.
Which is a pretty obvious way to interpret those slides! But of course this is the NSA - clearly the first thing we must to is ignore the simplest explanation and start proposing hardware backdoors in Intel processor instead.
Why is this tidbit such a big deal to you? I think you have unrealistic expectations.
Have you ever tried to get a story published in the "mainstream" media?
I've done technical writing. I also spent years explaining my pet issue to journalists, reports, policy makers, other lobbyists.
It's a miracle if the message gets thru mostly correctly.
You ever read a story about topic in which you're an expert? Then you know the press never get the story completely "right".
Even if lawyer Greenwald understood what computer expert Snowden was trying to explain, he'd still have a hard to time running that explanation past his editors. And I'm absolutely certain that whoever is reporting tried to explain novel ideas using layperson's language.
My problem is with people who appear convicted of the idea that Google's leadership are conspiring with NSA to deceive its customers, or that NSA is employing exotic and outrageous methods (like optical signal intercepts --- it's right there in the name Prism!), or that Palantir is somehow involved in Google-related surveillance, or that NSA is "disappearing" people... the list goes on and on.
I have a problem with the idea of conversations on HN reifying speculation that Google or Facebook are defrauding their customers; I also have a problem with bullshit stories clouding the very real problems we do have with overreaching surveillance.
I understand your frustration, but I think you're attacking the signal instead of the noise you're talking about.
There's definitely a lot of nonsense floating around (optical signal intercepts from these providers, etc.). This is noise.
But there is also a very real signal. A journalist with an inside source is telling us about a program that indicates some of these companies have given the NSA a level of access than most of us who know anything about systems would not be comfortable with.
While the degree to which this is happening has not been supported with evidence, numerous other claims have been. It has already forced the declassification of orders to the phone companies. This seems to be a very credible source.
Instead of attacking the noise, I see you attacking the signal. You're saying "These companies could not be doing this! Why would you believe someone saying they are!"
Maybe there is no such program, maybe the NSA doesn't even know what it's doing enough to make an accurate presentation, maybe the presentation was planted for the guy to find, and maybe the journalists are hacks. These are all possibilities. But with what we know, these are the extreme possibilities, and speculation about them is mostly noise. Defending hack-job articles attacking the source and messenger isn't increasing the quality of the conversation.
It seems that from what we're getting from the government and companies, we're getting closer to answers, but we're not there yet.
If the question you're raising is about the nature of the Prism program, I am very much looking forward to an answer to that. But I think the best approach is to see the evolution of responses from government and companies rather than smear the journalist as a hack for not immediately releasing the whole presentation.
To be fair, no one actually said Google and Facebook are defrauding advertisers
Agreed. For future, I encourage you to state your objections plainly. Like this (above). And perhaps focus on the issues, facts, details and less about the players.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
All the pennies (and beam splitters) have yet to drop. I would be shocked if the NSA wasn't coupling company cooperation with direct packet inspection/backbone wiretapping. They could even use the FISA requests as training data under some scenarios to help reverse engineer protocols.
You really want to bet that there is nothing more to see here, that more Room 641As don't exist? As for "conspiracy-theoretic-nonsense", a hidden conspiracy to wiretap hundreds of millions of Americans (derided as a "myth" by the NSA lawyer Rajesh De and lied about in front of Congress by Clapper) was just revealed -- because a man risked his life and freedom to leak the first FISA order in 35 years. Given that senior government officials are actually admitting in realtime to past untruths, it might be a good idea to be a wee bit less credulous when it comes to our government overlords.
The NSA is tapping undersea cables and sucking up e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g that crosses them AND getting data through court orders and national security letters AND getting all phone metadata from all phone companies AND tapping into the backbones at appropriate places and sucking up everything that crosses those places AND listening in to every satellite communication AND......
It's AND, not OR.
Simple terms. If either of those two points come to light (NSA backbone taps of Internet companies or clandestine NSA/IC operatives planted in Internet companies, perhaps in foreign subsidiaries of the same) you publicly post that you were wrong/credulous and the "conspiracy theorists" were right.
After all, if the FBI infiltrated [2] the unimportant KKK, the US government definitely has an incentive to infiltrate the all-important Google.
[1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/al...
Former director of the NSA’s World Geopolitical and
Military Analysis Reporting Group, William Binney, has
estimated that 10 to 20 such facilities have been
installed throughout the nation
And who even knows what the NSA's "lawful charter" is? Secret interpretations of laws (meaning secret laws) evidently mean it's ok for them to capture the phone records (and, as reported, credit card statements) of everyone. They lie about what they are doing under oath and they hunt, jail, and kill those who tell the truth.
They prevented these unconstitutional secret interpretations of the law from getting to the courts or to the public. That's the only reason why they haven't been struck down.
I responded, "tapping overseas cables is NSA's stated mission, and so it doesn't follow that they're tapping domestic communications".
You responded that of course they're exceeding their legal bounds, because the Fourth Amendment restricts them, which of course begs the question.
"tapping overseas cables is NSA's stated mission, and so it
doesn't follow that they're tapping domestic
communications".
Deep in the oceans, hundreds of cables carry much of the
world's phone and Internet traffic. Since at least the
early 1970s, the NSA has been tapping foreign cables. It
doesn't need permission. That's its job.
But Internet data doesn't care about borders. Send an email
from Pakistan to Afghanistan and it might pass through a
mail server in the United States, the same computer that
handles messages to and from Americans. The NSA is
prohibited from spying on Americans or anyone inside the
United States. That's the FBI's job and it requires a
warrant.
Despite that prohibition, shortly after the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush secretly
authorized the NSA to plug into the fiber optic cables that
enter and leave the United States, knowing it would give
the government unprecedented, warrantless access to
Americans' private conversations.http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/305047-dem-...
So if PRISM is just the tip of the iceberg, what method do you suggest for speculating as to what exactly they are doing domestically? Maybe, say, look what they are doing overseas?
Day 1: We see some out of context powerpoint implying Google, Facebook, et al. have given the NSA full access to private info.
Day 2: We find out that wasn't true at all.
Days 3+: We keep filling HN with articles about how awful it is that Google, Facebook, et al. gave the NSA full access to private info.
The tech media really dropped the ball on this one. It's absolutely insane to think all of the CEOs who said they'd never heard of PRISM or given the NSA any special access were lying. The CEO of a large publicly traded firm would be taking a huge risk and be certain to be caught for such bold-faced lies.
It reminds me of a great joke Stephen Colbert told about George W. Bush at the White House Correspondent's Dinner. Paraphrasing: "he'll think the same thing on Wednesday that he thought on Monday, no matter what happened on Tuesday."
"In 2006, USA Today published an article that revealed that Verizon, AT&T and BellSouth (since acquired by AT&T) were voluntarily providing the NSA with millions of call logs. It also said another landline provider, Qwest (since acquired by CenturyLink), refused to hand over logs without a warrant, and that the NSA had rejected Qwest's insistence that the matter go before the FISC.
In 2007, former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio was convicted on 19 counts of insider stock trading. During an appeal, Nacchio's lawyers claimed the charges were retaliation for Nacchio's refusal to go along with the warrantless surveillance program while he ran Qwest."
http://www.technewsdaily.com/18302-national-security-agency....
Just like it's a pure coincidence, of course, that of all the people out there hiring escorts, Elliot Spitzer gets rumbled.
Edit: and by the way, it was a jury trial. So not only was the SEC acting on behalf of the NSA, and the judge who sentenced him, but so was a 12 person jury. That's more believable.
How is it an "extreme interpretation" to read that as something "direct" is likely to be happening involving "servers of these U.S. Service Providers"?
Why should we bend over backwards to convince ourselves that what they really meant (but didn't say) was that they had indirect access only through intermediate layers of privacy-preserving systems that we architect from whole cloth in our own imagination?
Snowden's rationale is that he was in a position to understand exactly what was going on and that he leaked because he felt it was necessary for the public to know what he knew. Snowden himself contrasted his situation with Manning - he pointed out that Manning leaked hundreds of thousands of documents indiscriminately without possibly being able to read them all or understand their consequences or the risks and benefits involved in leaking them. Snowden said that, by contrast, he was very selective in what he leaked and he understood the issues completely.
But if one of the most serious claims that Snowden is making is wrong, it calls into question whether Snowden really had the knowledge that he claims he had.
Snowden's undoing may be trying to have the baby half way. People are really pissed off about this and are going to be looking for someone to blame. I wonder if he's going to end up looking even worse than Assange in the end by assuming personal responsibility for the effectiveness of the selective editing and redaction.
Personally, I don't feel like the weight of this story turns on the specifics of the interception hardware and the "directness" of the access. There's a slide deck that says "Dates when PRISM collection began for each provider" and "Collection of communications on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past". And that's just the four slides that The Guardian and WaPo didn't feel were too hot to handle.
What does it matter which server establishes the socket connection?
I wrote the backend for the exchange of electronic medical records. We used numerous protocols: scp, ftp, http, etc. And numerous formats: csv, hl7, xml, etc. We had numerous partners: pharma, labs, hospitals & clinics, EMTs, CDC, etc.
In all cases, I'd feel comfortable saying we had "direct access". Because in all cases, the audience of doctors, nurses, execs, admins knew enough to make policy decisions.
Would you drop this chew toy if the Guardian had written "near realtime live data feed"?
I'm willing to bet that the truth lies somewhere in between all of this, and that Snowden and Page can both be standing near the truth, leaving the administration and NSA out in the cold.
If the people freaking about "direct access" think it's wrong, I'd very much like them to correct the record.
tptacek? Care to explain precisely how the NSA slurps up all the data?
?
I'd like to think you are more intelligent than this, but the only real other option is that you are trolling, and neither are attractive or plausible.
"Our story was written from the start to say NSA claimed this, telecoms deny-we wanted them to have to work it out in public what they do. We reported - accurately - what the NSA claims. We reported - accurately - what the companies claim. It conflicts. That's why we reported it."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5845649
edited to be less conclusive
"The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, ___according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian___." (Em mine)
This is text from the message of yours which you are linking to here. It agrees with the quote bstrand provided.
Complete paragraph quote. Both claims in the last sentence --- that NSA has direct access, and can unilaterally sieze comms off servers --- now appear to be true, so much so that the Guardian itself is now walking them back.
The deck identified specific providers as on board or coming on board. Their denials looked similar. The deck characterized access as "direct"--direct in some context. As a wordsmith yourself, you certainly recognize such semantic fuzz, the loose context-dependent coupling of sign and signified.
And yet, you collapse the possibilities down, giving credence to authority. You cast scorn and ridicule, you narrow the bounds of respectable opinion with language like "extreme interpretations" and "conspiracy-theoretic nonsense".
One cannot have an informed opinion on a secret program. The harder you try, the more vulnerable you become to information censoring. Try the holistic approach, and reserve judgement.
I'm not the only person with these concerns. Here's Karl Fogel of QuestionCopyright.org:
http://www.rants.org/2013/06/11/epic_botch_of_prism_story/
And here's Mark Jaquith of Wordpress:
Because you are responsible for your opinions. What other people say is orthogonal to your own exercise of judgment. /schoolmarm
If they were innocent, we'd expect their denials to look similar. So why are so many people taking their denials looking similar as indicating guilt?
Isn't this a misdirection?
Personally, I believe there is a possibility that the name PRISM itself is an allusion to the method of data slurping the NSA has been using. Where there are plenty of articles talking about their fiber splicing actions etc...
I take PRISM to mean they were taking streams and were able to focus on a particular 'wavelength' in the stream and mirror it to their own systems.
I don't think they had "direct" access to FB systems - even though there are plenty of former CIA/SS/Military (and potentially NSA moles) already openly working as actual employees of FB - I don't think they necessarily needed full and direct access - the NSA taps the ISPs directly.
What I want to know is how much of that signal are they (a) storing indefinitely, (b) DPI or SSL decrypting, and (c) merely keyword analyzing. If they're storing it indefinitely and/or utilizing SSL MITM then we're pretty much done as far as privacy is concerned. But if they're just keyword analyzing cleartext packets then honestly who gives a shit.
My gut is telling me they're decrypting SSL. FB and Google moved to HTTPS everywhere a few years ago and they're clearly getting this data somehow so...
I think this probably nails it - but in reverse order:
They peel a stream off, keyword analyze it - in conjunction with other weights (i.e. who is talking, to whom, between where, what medium, when (i.e. the meta data)) and then they store the key ones.
If I am talking to my Grandma, the drop it. If I am talking to an unknown number in [foreign country] they test for keywords, if any are hits - they store it and add more meta-data.
I mean - the whole thing is what I understood the Mythical Project Echelon to be -- but there was never any concrete evidence of Echelon to the degree that it was rumored to be, until now.
Now we know that they definitely trap any packet they can wrangle.
The tech side of HOW they are seeing everything is inconsequential to the fact that they ARE seeing everything crossing the pipes.
The NSA requested all metadata from Verizon. That tells us something new.
What matters is how direct that access is. Does the government have to submit a warrant to get user-specific data, and then gets that data back in a drop box like system? Then there's nothing illegal, surprising, or even sketchy about that. Can the government get direct access to Facebook's servers without going through their legal department? Then that's a big deal!
It's indeed very sketchy that the NSA asks for the metadata of all the Verizon customers.
#define metadata DNA samples for breeding a clone armyGreenwald is our version of Richard Land. Not even interesting sociologically.
What we do know is:
Snowdon leaked slides showing a Boundless informant program to catalogue data - almost 3 billion records collected over the month of March 2013 just from US sources - that's a huge amount of data for an agency that doesn't have a remit to surveill Americans.
Every phone call in the US is now being recorded by the NSA - that is almost the biggest story here, since we don't know if they also tap email headers, which would probably be worse.
Oversight of the NSA and other agencies is impotent, and most of congress simply wasn't aware of even the broad scope of the surveillance, let alone details.
DNI Clapper lied to congress with impunity over surveillance of Americans, the NSA lied over not having counts of records.
The NSA's standards are incredibly lax (allowing this leak to happen - he shouldn't have reached the front door with this data), and their interpretation of their remit worryingly broad (extending to collecting at least phone (and probably more) metadata on every single American and company). If the IT tech Snowdon had access to all this data, other countries probably have it already by other means.
Snowdon leaked slides on PRISM claiming 'collection directly from the servers' - this was presented by Greenwald and the Guardian as a claim to be verified and contrasted with Google's denial of direct access (I feel both are probably true - the slide in a broad sense, and Google in a narrow sense). The quotemarks in Guardian articles are there to attribute, not to undermine the content quoted.
Snowdon claims to have had access to anyone's email at providers like Google without obstruction at his relatively high clearance level (unverified) - I think he wanted to point out the lack of supervision of the process (hence ref. to president's personal email), and the lack of interaction with Google staff - the truth of this claim has yet to be tested and various important points (how quickly, what supervision, what sort of data etc) are elided. I'd like to hear more from Snowdon and Greenwald (or the US gov) on this.
If you are truly interested in all the issues raised by these leaks, you should address those very real and serious topics, not minor quibbles over whether a journalist's interpretation of the technical details of a transfer of records is correct. I can see why people might have jumped to conclusions over 'direct access', and do feel it's important to get to the bottom of the real process (I'm sure Google would love to tell if only to put the wilder theories to bed), but the reality without that is bad enough - given the many other programs we know about, and the admitted details of PRISM/FISA requests. I was a bit dishearted by the initial Google response but am pleased they are now pressuring the government to release figures for FISA requests, so that people can see the extent of the program as it impacts Google, but this issue is about more than Google and Facebook and records they might return on the basis of FISA requests. That would help define the scope of one of the many programs.
That reality of broad surveillance without adequate supervision is enough to put people off doing business in the US or hosting data there, and the acknowledged facts are enough to make it very easy for an unscrupulous president like Nixon to turn the US into a surveillance state and capture all the levers of power very quickly - something that should worry all American citizens. That is what Snowdon was warning against (see the last part of his video), and that is the most insidious part of this sort of widespread surveillance unchecked by public law and public courts - not how it is used today, but what it might enable if it is allowed to continue.
I haven't heard this at all, from reading the top 10 stories on HN.
The facts are getting buried in the outrage about the facts.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-boundless-in...
and the secret Verizon order on phone records:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-record...
although again this is unattributed and simply 'obtained by the Guardian', but the story was written by Glen Greenwald just before the Snowdon video, and I seriously doubt they have two sources with top secret clearance in the NSA.
And of course there are the assertions in his video, which I also consider a leak (though so far without details to back it up).
For all ordinary people, i.e., most of the world outside HN, the "access" part is the element that constitutes the scandal. "Direct" merely hints at the method, of which the details are considerably less relevant to most people than they are to us.
If the NSA had received the data via flash drives attached to carrier pigeons it wouldn't have made any difference to the core of the story.
It definitely doesn't make the story "a lie", at least not to anyone else but lawyers and techies.
What is a big deal is that my personal conversations and yours and your mother's are being recorded, read and stored to be used against us later. That is a big deal. Human rights. Civil liberties. Not living in constant fear. Those are the real issues.
Someone on Twitter (sorry) said that Google and Facebook "looked like angels" compared to Verizon. That sounds about right to me, too. But what incentive do they have to do that when their reward is conspiracy-theoretic nonsense about how NSA has their TLS keys and 3rd party contractors are used to keep them from "lying" when they say NSA has no direct access?