Larry Page about the PRISM program: "What the ...?"

^{NSA Headquarters}

As you know, on June 6, The Washington Post published slides from a 41-page PowerPoint presentation , which deals with the NSA's secret civilian monitoring program. Allegedly, within the framework of the PRISM program, nine Internet companies provided the NSA with direct access to their servers to obtain information about users: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL and Apple.


At the same time, The Guardian newspaper posted a secret court ruling to the Internet , according to which the Verizon mobile operator was obliged to provide the NSA with metadata about calls from all subscribers from April to July 2013, with the delivery of information on a daily basis (subscriber numbers, time and duration of calls).


Almost all of the above-mentioned Internet companies instantly denied that they provided government organizations with "direct access" to the servers. This led some observers to argue that the NSA could work through a private contractor - for example, the company Palantir (a refutation of Palantir ).
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^{The new NSA data center in Utah should be operational in September 2013, it covers an area of ​​almost 10 hectares and will become the largest node in the ANB information network, the estimated construction cost is estimated at two billion dollars. See information on the NSA website.}

Yesterday, June 7, the scandal reached a new level. The British Prime Minister requested that an investigation be initiated into the fact that the GCHQ Government Communications Center had access to personal information on citizens using the NSA's secret court inquiries procedure through FISC (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court), as in the case of Verizon.

US National Intelligence Director James Clapper (James R. Clapper) made an official statement in which he pointed out inaccuracies in newspaper publications and called these leaks "reproducible." Among other things, he said that the NSA did not intentionally spy on American citizens. Apparently, the position of the special services is such that the NSA did in fact request the cellular operators for information on the calls of all subscribers, but only to filter out foreigners - and perform data mining only in relation to them, which is completely legal.

In addition, Klapper hinted at the possibility of prosecuting journalists who published secret information, as Bradley Manning is now judging, having merged into the Wikileaks documents about war crimes of the US Army. The “secret information” refers to a court order against Verizon, which the NSA recognizes as authentic.

Interestingly, two weeks ago, the director of the NSA said that their service was “the only one that does NOT follow the Americans . ” Allegedly, the NSA "does not have the technical ability to analyze the 420 billion letters that Americans generate every day, although some foreign governments are trying to do this."

President Obama defended the NSA and assured the Americans that “no one is listening to your telephone conversations,” and all the actions of the special services are aimed at protecting the country from terrorists. Like, a small loss of privacy - the inevitable retribution for the best security. It’s impossible to have 100% protection and 100% privacy at the same time, the president explained.

The scandal is rapidly gaining momentum. The case has already entered Anonymous, who posted 13 more documents on the activity of US intelligence in 35 countries.

Last night, Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page gave official comments on the PRISM program.

Larry Page said sharply: his statement was published under the heading “What the ...?”. He said that he had never heard of the PRISM program until yesterday, and Google was not involved in any government programs that give the authorities direct access to the servers. Google satisfies the requirements of the special services only within the law. Google lawyers carefully consider each request for the release of information and often wrap it back if the request is too extensive (as is the case with Verizon). “Press reports that Google provides open access to the data of its users are false, period,” Larry Page writes. “Until this week, we have never heard of such extensive requests as Verizon received — a request that requires recordings of calls from millions of users. We were surprised to learn that such requests exist at all. Any suggestion that Google disclosed information about our users' Internet activity on such a scale is a complete lie. ”

Larry Page added that, as far as possible, Google publishes information on requests received from the state on the Transparency Report website.

UPD. Lead development engineer (Chief Architect) of Google, Yonatan Zunger, expressed disgust at the NSA's plans for mass collection of information on citizens and guaranteed that Google was not involved in this, otherwise he would not work here.