Direct Access is a red herring. What I want to know is if they had full conent mirroring, MITM nodes etc.

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.

I think given the "direct access" note in the slide, SV's weird focus on the word "direct", the name "PRISM", and the outing of AT&T 641A a few years ago it is definitely within reason to assume they're beam splitting the fiber signal at the ISP level. That provides plausible deniability to Google, FB, etc.

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...

>"how much of that signal are they (a) storing indefinitely, (b) DPI or SSL decrypting, and (c) merely keyword analyzing.

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.

They do do "upstream collection", it says so in the released slides. However they also do "direct collection" from the webapp companies ("You Should Use Both"), so it doesn't provide SV with plausible deniability.

What matters is the scope of the access, how broad it is. Not if the access is "direct" or not. That's semantics.

The NSA requested all metadata from Verizon. That tells us something new.

It's not semantics at all. The "scope" is infinite. The government can get pretty much any information that exists pursuant to a valid warrant or subpoena. That has been true since the founding of the republic, and was true in England for hundreds of years before that.

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!

I mean the scope of the already requested data, not of the data they could potentially request.

It's indeed very sketchy that the NSA asks for the metadata of all the Verizon customers.