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> court-approved

Remember, this a secret court, whose judges are likely highly biased in favor the government, with secret proceedings where only the NSA gets to make a case. Not exactly a legitimate safeguard.

I also have reservations about the grandparent comment, but PRISM is still pretty awful.

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Again, I'm not defending them in any way but all we know about the program is that it allows the kangaroo courts to order searches of information stored on those servers. We have no reason to believe it includes the ability to e.g. compel Google to ship a compromised version of Chrome to a specific user and the fact that the NSA has an entire program to develop and deploy rookits supports that interpretation since it's far more expensive than just asking the company to do it for you.

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