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Through a top-secret program authorized by federal judges working under the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the U.S. intelligence
community can gain access to the servers of nine Internet companies for a
wide range of digital data. Documents describing the previously undisclosed
program, obtained by The Washington Post, show the breadth of U.S.
electronic surveillance capabilities in the wake of a widely publicized
controversy over warrantless wiretapping of U.S. domestic telephone
communications in 2005. These slides, annotated by The Washington Post,
represent a selection from the overall document, and certain portions are
redacted.
Read related article.
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Introducing the program A slide briefing analysts at the National Security Agency
about the program touts its effectiveness and features the logos of the
companies involved.
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| The seal of Special Source
Operations, the NSA term for alliances with trusted U.S. companies. |
The program is called PRISM, after the prisms
used to split light, which is used to carry information on fiber-optic
cables.
This note indicates that the program is the
number one source of raw intelligence used for NSA analytic reports.
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Monitoring a target's communication
This diagram shows how the bulk of the world’s electronic
communications move through companies based in the United States.
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Providers
and data
The PRISM program collects a wide range of data from the
nine companies, although the details vary by provider.
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Participating providers
This slide shows when each company joined the program, with
Microsoft being the first, on Sept. 11, 2007, and Apple the most recent, in
October 2012.
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