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Comment by psbp | Hacker News Reader

Wait, what? Yahoo is still part of PRISM. We don't really know how Google, Apple, Dropbox, etc. reacted to attempts by the NSA to be put under PRISM.

We only know that Microsoft wilfully made it as easy and accessible as possible, but no other company has revealed to be more culpable (or victimized?) than the rest.

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I think it is pretty clear that the person you are responding to is pleased with the progress Yahoo is making. Criticizing them for still being a part of PRISM is not entirely fair as I imagine these companies are all being coerced. To see good news about Yahoo taking an anti prism stance, see someone say "I'm going to use Yahoo products more" and then say what you said seems a bit disingenuous honestly.

Well, Apple was the last of the bigs to buckle.

Apple was probably the last approached as until fairly recently they didn't have any data as their cloud services were categorical failures.

No data? What about iTunes?

If the NSA actually pays any consideration to how the value of their data helps find "terrorists"/criminals, iTunes data is probably not particularly valuable.

I don't know. Apparently Syria's Assad used iTunes:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/14/assad-itunes-ema...

I imagine it'd be an easy way of finding the IP addresses of the devices actually being personally used by him (hypothetically speaking).

itunes is not the product that would get the NSA salivating - not much of it's data was that useful imo before the phones came out. It's about phones and messaging. When did imessage get released? How long have apple been able to track your location with GPS? How long have you been storing your photos on the cloud (whether or not you realised it) etc etc.

Once they had 1-2 of the big tech companies as precedent they really just would have started to go round to anyone they thought might be of interest. Because that is the whole point. Collect everything you can get your grubby mitts on and sort through it later.

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