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Comment by xenophanes | Hacker News Reader

Of course it's weaseling. Maybe they disclosed such information on a slightly lesser scale. That passage doesn't say.

They all said stuff about "direct access", without discussing what would and wouldn't qualify as "indirect". They didn't deny doing all kinds of different access that could be called indirect in some way.

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WaPost backtracks on claim tech companies ‘participate knowingly’ in PRISM data collection

http://thenextweb.com/us/2013/06/07/wapost-backtracks-on-cla...;

Of course they don't deny indirect because that would be a lie. Everyone provides data indirectly via a thing called "warrants". Google publishes how many indirect requests they comply with right here: http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests

The thing is we can't trust any statement by anyone because of the gagging component of NSLs. I've heard it said that the above information is for FBI requests under the patriot act and doesn't include NSLs. For all we know NSL gags could explicitly forbid that kind of reporting and may even compel the recipients to lie if asked.

The last sentence he made, that the government needs to be far more transparent about what they're doing is the only sentence I can really trust as honest, especially given that the alternative to lying could be being thrown into Guantanamo for 'assisting terrorists'.

Those goole reports are for regular law enforcement requests. They have nothing to do with spying that happens in the name of national intelligence.

False, national intelligence is still covered by Google's transparency report - see the NSL (National Security Letters) part.

>The presentation claims Prism was introduced to overcome what the NSA regarded as shortcomings of Fisa warrants in tracking suspected foreign terrorists. It noted that the US has a "home-field advantage" due to housing much of the internet's architecture. But the presentation claimed "Fisa constraints restricted our home-field advantage" because Fisa required individual warrants and confirmations that both the sender and receiver of a communication were outside the US.

>"Fisa was broken because it provided privacy protections to people who were not entitled to them," the presentation claimed. "It took a Fisa court order to collect on foreigners overseas who were communicating with other foreigners overseas simply because the government was collecting off a wire in the United States. There were too many email accounts to be practical to seek Fisas for all."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-n...

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