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The 20M project could well be a number of things not involving the companies direct participation

* An interface to fuse data received by court order from each site.

* A scraping tool to pull in open source data, possibly with seed accounts (i.e., a facebook account for each university) to give you better access.

* Scraping data on the wire to and from each service, at the level of the internet backbone

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This is also what I sort of assume. All of these tech companies like facebook, and google, probably got so many requests for info from the feds that at a certain point, it must have somehow made sense to switch it up and just give them an automated web form somewhere. (direct access to servers..) The telcos have probably had these since way back.. Eventually, there would be quite a few of these web forms, so some 'top' coders put together a system for the feds to query all of the forms at once with one request. Paint on a GUI and call it PRISM. It was nice to hear that Yahoo! still sorts out their fed requests by hand.

Facebook and Google (Zuck & Page) have also stated that each request for data is inspected individually. I don't know where you're getting that there's some automated system for pulling user data.

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