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Comment by mpyne | Hacker News Reader

So in other words, the Guardian is saying that I'm right (again)? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5859493

Greenwald, in (I think) a slippery way, tried to start walking this back last week:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5845649

Here's an interesting take on Mr. Greenwald's handling of this story: http://thedailybanter.com/2013/06/greenwald-sticks-with-his-...

A pyrrhic victory if Google's interface is

    Bool is_NSA_authorized(int fisa_id) const
    {

        return True; // Our hands are tied by FAA 702.
                     // We really don't want to be doing this.
                     // But we have no choice, its "legal".
                     // I hope the NSA has some procedures
                     // to make sure this isn't abused.
                     // Otherwise they could get anything
                     // they want from us. 
    }

Also this is all a sideshow if Google is in fact trying to conceal the existence of alien spacecraft recovered from Roswell.

That could have been their manual process before Prism as well...

It may well have been . And thats not their fault if their hands are legally tied. Especially since they appear to be trying to actually disclose what they have to hand over.

My comment wasn't meant as a dig at Google, they are forced to comply with what ever the law actually authorized. My point was we need to know how much they can actually be forced to hand over and what checks there are on that power being abused.

I think it's possible that Steve Gibson is right on this week's Security Now podcast. He suggests that perhaps the NSA has tapped into the ISP just upstream of the 9 companies listed. Then, they copy all of the data coming into and out of the fiber going to the Google datacenters. This fits with the name Prism, and is corroborated by the 2006 revelation about the NSA-controlled room in the ATT building in San Francisco.

Edit: this does rely on the NSA having access to routers, not servers, so it still isn't exactly what they said

Yeah, the NSA might have a system like that for all I know, but it's going to be named something other than PRISM.

While certainly a possibility, that really wouldn't fit in with everything else we've heard about PRISM, including what the tech companies have said. It also wouldn't allow the NSA to view data transferred over SSL (which I believe is all gmail and Facebook traffic, at least for me) -- unless the NSA has broken the encryption algorithms.

With a 20M budget?

Prism might only be part of it, there are ways of breaking up projects in budgets obviously. It could just feed the data into another system

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