Washington Post and Guardian Reveal NSA PRISM Program for Direct Server Access

The Washington Post and The Guardian simultaneously published explosive revelations about PRISM, a classified program allowing the National Security Agency and FBI to tap directly into the central servers of nine major U.S. internet companies to extract audio, video, photographs, emails, documents, and connection logs. The program, authorized under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, enabled intelligence analysts to track individuals’ movements and contacts over time.

The companies identified in the leaked NSA presentation slides included Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple, with Microsoft joining as early as 2007. According to the documents, PRISM was described as “the number one source of raw intelligence used for NSA analytic reports” and accounted for 91% of the NSA’s internet traffic acquired under FISA Section 702 authority.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper quickly issued a statement on June 7, 2013, confirming that for nearly six years the government had been using large internet services companies to collect information on foreigners outside the United States. However, the revelation sparked immediate concerns that the program was also sweeping up vast amounts of data on American citizens. The PRISM disclosures, coming just one day after the Verizon metadata story, demonstrated the breadth and sophistication of the NSA’s surveillance capabilities and triggered a fundamental reassessment of privacy in the digital age. Tech companies initially denied providing “direct access” to their servers, though the specifics of their cooperation remained contested.