Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg and Google's CEO Larry Page along with it's Chief Legal Officer David Drummond, have issued public statements denying handing over full access to their servers to the NSA for the recently exposed prism program, which shown in slides yesterday include Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL,
Skype, YouTube, Apple.According to Google "U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers," and they were not aware of the Prism program, but they do admit "we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law."
That is the denial with a distinction because the secret FISA court order is "in accoradance with the law.
New York Times explains why the denials are hollow at best.
Details on the discussions help explain the disparity between initial descriptions of the government program and the companies’ responses.
Each of the nine companies said it had no knowledge of a government program providing officials with access to its servers, and drew a bright line between giving the government wholesale access to its servers to collect user data and giving them specific data in response to individual court orders. Each said it did not provide the government with full, indiscriminate access to its servers.
The companies said they do, however, comply with individual court orders, including under FISA. The negotiations, and the technical systems for sharing data with the government, fit in that category because they involve access to data under individual FISA requests. And in some cases, the data is transmitted to the government electronically, using a company’s servers.
“The U.S. government does not have direct access or a ‘back door’ to the information stored in our data centers,” Google’s chief executive, Larry Page, and its chief legal officer, David Drummond, said in a statement on Friday. “We provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law.”
Statements from Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple, AOL and Paltalk made the same distinction. But instead of adding a back door to their servers, the companies were essentially asked to erect a locked mailbox and give the government the key, people briefed on the negotiations said. Facebook, for instance, built such a system for requesting and sharing the information, they said.
The data shared in these ways, the people said, is shared after company lawyers have reviewed the FISA request according to company practice. It is not sent automatically or in bulk, and the government does not have full access to company servers. Instead, they said, it is a more secure and efficient way to hand over the data.
Tech companies might have also denied knowledge of the full scope of cooperation with national security officials because employees whose job it is to comply with FISA requests are not allowed to discuss the details even with others at the company, and in some cases have national security clearance, according to both a former senior government official and a lawyer representing a technology company.
Read the entire piece.
The scope of the NSA Surveillance Program is still being revealed, but Democratic and Republican lawmakers say that Barack Obama's assurance that all members of Congress were briefed was a lie.
According to Obama, these attacks against civil liberties and privacy are only a "modest encroachments on privacy."
