The Washington Post has released more slides about the National Security Agency’s PRISM program. When news of PRISM first broke many of the companies listed in the initially released slides, including Facebook and Apple, claimed they weren’t actively participating in any such program. The newly released slides refutes those refutations. According to those slides the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) has hardware located on the premises of PRISM participants:
The FBI uses government equipment on private company property to retrieve matching information from a participating company, such as Microsoft or Yahoo and pass it without further review to the NSA.
PRISM simply accesses those FBI systems. In other words, PRISM participants can claim to not be participating in the program because the program is actually querying FBI systems. Likewise, the NSA can claim they have no direct access to PRISM participant servers. It’s a wonderful web of denial that the state has managed to setup.