They aren't telling, and that may be telling on itself. Court approval apparently is needed but then Verizon hands all metadata every day, based on a court approval.
Expected, unless the leaked doc said "ignore court order" or "kill the Presi..." leaking is illegal.
The person that leaked this knew that he /she would be prosecuted, if... Let's hope that he took care not to leave any crumbs as he gave the info to the Guardian
The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compels Verizon to produce to the NSA electronic copies of "all call detail records or 'telephony metadata' created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad" or "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls".
The order directs Verizon to "continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this order". It specifies that the records to be produced include "session identifying information", such as "originating and terminating number", the duration of each call, telephone calling card numbers, trunk identifiers, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, and "comprehensive communication routing information".
This court order and the extremely wide net makes me believe the worst for the rest.
Google went on record as saying that they'd never even heard of any FISA order remotely as broad as that before the Verizon story broke, let alone acceded to one, and other tech companies said something similar. That doesn't answer every question about just how much ground the orders moving through the tech companies' streamlined new FISA-order pipeline cover. But does mean that either the tech CEOs are orchestrating a brazen and elaborate lie, or they're not sharing information on anything close to the Verizon scale.
Or their marching orders are to provide live data collection on specific government-identified suspects, rather than live data collection on all users.
In which case, they could claim to be lawfully complying with information requests that are "not as broad", even if the system as designed makes it as easy for the NSA as hitting a "monitor this person" button.
It also wouldn't take vast systemic corporate knowledge. All centralized systems have centralized administrative control that allow for in-depth view and analysis of user accounts and data, and most large-scale systems have relatively powerful and easy-to-use tooling (especially to support customer service, sales, etc).
Complete access to those systems is generally restricted due to the likelihood for abuse, but there remain valid internal management reasons for such access.
Adding to those systems to allow the NSA unfettered (or barely fettered) access could be done without having to alert the entire organization that their internal management systems, which they built knowingly, and have no reason to distrust, have been subverted to allow for on-demand government spying.
Wow! Just waiting for "directly doesn't mean direct access" excuse. He has posted the slide, and considering what happened with Verizon I am likely to believe that Google, Facebook and "we care about your privacy" Microsoft have given them just as much as Verizon. Or a lot, one way or another.
On another topic, oh to be a fly in the wall when Mr US Citizen Greenwald passes through JFK customs.
Prism docs leaked put a huge accent on the fact that it is real-time.
On top of that google take-out is just google but a lot of other companies are listed as well. So, all things taken into account the two most likely have nothing to do with each other.
Rachelbythebay does not let any chance go by to diss her former employer and that's fine by me as long as it is based in fact, not in speculation. If she knows for a fact that this is the case that would change things considerably but from where I'm sitting this looks like speculation to me.
Google is not alone with this kind of user data export feature.
And just because systems like PRISM are in use, doesn't render data export for specific users useless:
PRISM might for example identify some users of specific interest. As a result, NSA might access all Google data in relation to this user in structured form. Legal interception ports in hardware and software have been known for years, they are mandatory in many countries. And while live surveillance can be important too, most results are gathered from structured user data and meta data. And in any case, why should the same work be done twice? Why should NSA do work that has already been done by Google etc.?
giving preferential treatment to the places frequented by our social networking friends, the places we mention in our emails, the sites we look up on the search engine.
This all of the sudden looks like a nightmare to me, post NSA Prism. You aren't getting that info from me. Not Google, not Facebook.
It's a disgrace. Not to pick on any particular person, considering that Silicon Valley has dozens of billionaires and thousands of filthy rich people, but Sean Parker got lucky with Facebook and spent like $12.5m in a wedding (including a fine). It's their money and all, but can't these rich people also write a $1 million check to an org as important as EFF ?
How much one donates is a distraction from the actual point.
The point is that these people have made their fortunes using the internet, and probably in no small part the freedoms that exist(ed). Its is not that they are rich, is system on which they got rich. I think many people would feel that such people should donate as a sort of pay back, paying one's dues. The rich part of the point simple suggests that a decent donation would be small fry to such people, and cause them no pain. $5 to some people could be a significant hit to the pocket.
Edit:
Been in garden, letting the subconscious flow, and it suddenly occurred to me that donations from the likes of google and facebook would be a problem. Eventually EFF would be accused of being in google's pocket and all hell would break loose.
Begs the question: how can the likes of google donate to the likes of the EFF with out there being the suspicion of a conflict of interest?
I certainly can write a check for $5 (and have donated more than that), but the thing is, a $1m donation from a rich person does a lot more than my $5 - specifically, it does 200,000x more.
The widow's mite is, in the end, still just a mite.
Google has way more data from a million little things we online than it should have. The government can easily get it, it can leak, get hacked etc. If the data isn't archived, no one can ask for it. Simple as that.
"If they were servicing extremely-broad FISAs like Verizon's "send us all your phone metadata" then the distinction would be academic, but both Google and the NYT seem clear that Google hasn't accepted anything on close to that scale."
Maybe I read it wrong but Verizon was ordered by the court to do just that and to shut up about it. I doubt they were asked to accept, just the court ordered it and it is so because it became a 'legal request.' I have to wonder what Google, Microsoft and Facebook were asked to provide to NSA in large scale. If they can have all calls to see if anyone calls certain "terrorists," why not get a log of all Skype calls, FB likes, messages, Google searches etc to see if anyone is linked to "terrorists" or searching for related materials?
Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received—an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users’ call records. We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely false.
Now that could conceivably be a bald lie - or I suppose they could just conceivably have lost awareness of what their FISA/NSL/warrant-handling lawyers were approving, to a spectacular extent - but otherwise they aren't handling any Verizon-scale FISA warrants. However, you're right: there's a big grey area between Verizon-scale "megawarrants" and the "specific orders about individuals" the tech companies say they process. NYT said "FISA orders can range from inquiries about specific people to a broad sweep for intelligence, like logs of certain search terms" while the tech companies largely reasserted that they only process "specific orders about individuals". It seems that only one source can be accurate here.
BTW I assume that Verizon wasn't really just forced into handing over all its metadata: there was probably a bit of a gentleman's agreement in the government producing an omnibus FISA order and Verizon agreeing not to contest its legality. Everyone spends less time processing FISA orders, the government gets all the metadata it wants, and Verizon gets a sicknote to cover it legally.
