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Re:NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants by tptacek on Saturday June 15, 2013 @11:07PM (#5887263)
Marc Ambinder, a reporter who has covered the national security beat for many years (before that he was a political reporter for The Atlantic, and before that the White House reporter for --- I think? --- CBS), reported that PRISM is a system of dropbox servers and a user interface that allows seamless access to all of those servers, presumably so that analysts don't have to keep track of which data is affiliated with Google and which data is affiliated with Yahoo.

Other reports have corroborated this.

Declan McCullagh, who has covered this beat for CNet for something like 10 years and is most notable on HN for jumping into threads and arguing the EFF's side of any given story against me (in other words: not a guy prone to support of the establishment), ran a story last week with sources that also denied that NSA had unilateral access to Google Mail.

The NYT just a few days ago ran a story with a linked FISA court order that documented Yahoo's attempt to push back on a FISA directive, a process that would not have been necessary (for the government) had NSA had direct access to Yahoo's servers; the court order demanded that Yahoo turn over data.

And, of course, Google categorically denies that NSA has direct unilateral access to their servers and, for that matter, that they've been able to obtain records for large fractions of their user base. Those denials have come from multiple levels of the company, from the CEO to the General Counsel to their tech leaders to people on their security team.

I'm not simply supposing that NSA doesn't have this access. Based on the evidence available, I am drawing the obvious conclusion that they do not.

Re:NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants by vidarh on Sunday June 16, 2013 @04:32AM (#5887861)
The slides claim NSA has access to company servers. It does not claim they have free access to whatever they want. A system of "dropboxes" coupled with a system to get specific sets of data onto them - whether reviewed by humans or not - could fit with that.

That would not contradict the Guardian reporting, or even what the NSA's slides claim.

The rest of what you state also does not contradict Guardians reporting: They make specific claims about specific subsets of these companies data.

You keep arguing about an expansive interpretation of the reporting even when faced with much more restricted alternative interpretations.

When comes to relying on press releases with denials, I'm clearly more cynical than you - I assign them pretty much zero value as evidence. I'd expect these companies to issue denials whether the claims are true or not, so I don't see the press releases as containing any useful information to draw inferences from.

Re:NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants by declan on Sunday June 16, 2013 @12:36AM (#5887469)
Hey! That's me! (I've covered this beat at CNET for 11 years and at Wired and Time and Wired a second time before that for about 5 years. It's not the EFF's side I'd argue, but I'm flattered that you think so.)

Anyway, I've disagreed politely with <tptacek> before, but he is 100% correct here.

Re:NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants by twelvechairs on Sunday June 16, 2013 @03:35AM (#5887780)
Thanks for the detail - I now understand you view far better than earlier in the thread. will read these articles when I have the time