14 DAY TRIAL // Tech companies weren’t so oblivious to what the NSA was doing, one of the agency’s top lawyers said.
According to Rajesh De, the NSA’s general counsel, Google, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and all other companies, actually knew about PRISM and about the fact that the intelligence agency was collecting data from them.
The revelation made by the NSA comes many months after the revealing of PRISM, especially since this was one of the first programs revealed by the media based on Edward Snowden’s files. During this time, tech giants continuously denied any knowledge of PRISM before the media put the program under the spotlight, while also denying willingly helping out the National Security Agency.
This was proven by Yahoo after the company managed to declassify some court files revealing that it tried to fight off the NSA, but was forced to comply.
“PRISM was an internal government term that as the result of leaks became the public term. Collection under this program was a compulsory legal process that any recipient company would receive,” said Rajesh De in front of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, The Guardian reports.
What he’s trying to say is that if a company was receiving data requests, they’d have been subject to PRISM, they just weren’t aware of the name.
He was then asked whether the NSA data collection was performed with the “full knowledge and assistance” of companies from which information was obtained, and he replied in the affirmative.
The first batch of revelations was rather confusing to everyone and it was unclear whether the NSA simply took whatever data it wanted or if it had to make formal requests to get information.
It was later revealed that the NSA had to send companies requests, which were then forced to comply and send over the demanded data.
Each company handled the entire process differently, but what it sums up to is that they were legally forced to comply, as exemplified by the reaction the court had to Yahoo’s request to overturn a set of requests.
It’s rather unclear exactly what the NSA is trying to accomplish with these statements, since this can only damage the image of the companies in question in a situation where the United States really shouldn’t be trying to drag them down since their image has already been damaged. Considering just how many of the USA’s top companies are part of the tech industry, perhaps this wasn’t the best move.