I Can Believe That

When the Guardian and the Washington Post broke the Prism story in June, thanks to documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, nearly all the companies listed as participating in the program – Yahoo, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and AOL – claimed they did not know about a surveillance practice described as giving NSA vast access to their customers’ data. Some, like Apple, said they had “never heard” the term Prism.

[...]

[On Wednesday,] Rajesh De, the NSA general counsel, said all communications content and associated metadata harvested by the NSA under a 2008 surveillance law occurred with the knowledge of the companies – both for the internet collection program known as Prism and for the so-called “upstream” collection of communications moving across the internet.

  The Guardian

Yes, I can believe that. I am also aware that under threat of government penalty, some of them may not have felt they had much option. On the other hand, there have been a couple of companies holding themselves to a higher standard and shut down business rather than expose their customers to the secret spy programs. (eg. Lavabit)

De explained: “Prism was an internal government term that as the result of leaks became the public term,” De said. “Collection under this program was a compulsory legal process, that any recipient company would receive.”

After the hearing, De said that the same knowledge, and associated legal processes, also apply when the NSA harvests communications data not from companies directly but in transit across the internet, under Section 702 authority.

And yet, Mark Zuckerberg is "confused" and "frustrated" by the NSA's activity. Let's try to imagine what he really said to President Obama.  (Yes, apparently the child founder of Facebook has enough sway - read, "money" - that he can phone up the O and have his call taken.)  "Look, Barry, this is making me look bad.  Facebook could stand to lose its place on the global scene.  We need to talk."