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Comment by lern_too_spel | Hacker News Reader

Don't they have any editors? "Over the following weeks and months, Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s global surveillance efforts, and in particular its bulk data collection program, called PRISM," has been known to be wrong for a few years now. This calls the rest of the reporting into question.

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They have? I must've missed the announcement stating this about what Snowden told the world. Care to expand on it?

Pretty much everybody in Silicon Valley knows how wrong Snowden was about PRISM. Unlike The Guardian, The New York Times interviewed actual engineers and got the story correct from the very beginning.

Here is a competent explanation of how Snowden didn't understand that DITU is an FBI department and not a bulk collection system on internet companies' networks: https://medium.com/@alecmuffett/how-to-talk-about-prism-and-...

What? That doesn't say PRISM doesn't exist it says it does and suggests how it might be used ("I imagine"). It says the info is collected.

In particular, the information is collected by the FBI and is not bulk collection of all their data but targeted Section 702 collection of certain users' data, as I said above.

I don't understand why you're being downvoted, considering this one fact:

PRISM was ran on a budget of $200,000/year.

This may be enough money to put together and maintain a sad-looking web portal that lets you make requests for user data against Google, Apple, and Yahoo's legal compliance departments.

This is by no means enough to do bulk data collection for billions of users. (That was the domain of the other hundred-odd programs that the NSA runs.)

> Pretty much everybody in Silicon Valley

Really? Do you have the numbers to back that up?

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