After its programs were dubbed unconstitutional, the NSA shelled out millions

Aug 23, 2013 15:02 GMT  ·  By

It looks like the National Security Agency didn’t bother spending millions of dollars to cover the costs of major Internet companies involved in the PRISM program.

According to a newly leaked document from the NSA/Snowden stack, the Guardian reports the NSA paid for everything that was needed to make surveillance constitutional again after the FISA court told them to fix things up.

The tech companies mentioned in the PRISM files include Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple. They all needed to meet new certification demands in the wake of the ruling the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court made in 2011.

The document in question has already been declassified by the Obama administration earlier this week. There, it was revealed that the NSA was unable to filter out communications taking place in the United States, and these ended up piled together with all the rest of data collected from abroad.

The ruling caused some issues for the NSA, who had to abide to the ruling of the FISA court.

An NSA newsletter from 2012 states that “last year’s problems resulted in multiple extensions to the certifications’ expiration dates which cost millions of dollars for Prism providers to implement each successive extension – costs covered by Special Source Operation.“

And since all aforementioned companies have been denying all involvement, another newsletter specifically names them.

“All Prism providers, except Yahoo and Google, were successfully transitioned to the new certifications. We expect Yahoo and Google to complete transitioning by Friday 6 October,” one line reads.

Asked for some input, Yahoo’s spokesperson said that federal law requires the United States government to “reimburse providers for costs incurred to respond to compulsory legal process imposed by the government.”

Google, on the other hand, missed the mark and, instead of answering the question, went on about the petition they made to publish more national security requests data.