After Edward Snowden exposed the NSA's PRISM program, which involved several top technology companies' cooperation, those companies began disclosing information and demanding permission from the government to be more transparent with their customers. But perhaps the newest revelation wasn't the kind of transparency they wanted.
The Guardian - which has published the most recent major revelations in the ongoing National Security Agency PRISM story - published another doozy on Thursday. According to their report, the NSA paid millions of dollars to companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook to cover the cost that its PRISM surveillance program was incurring. The information came from a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court document, which was declassified this week by the Obama administration.
The FISA court found, in an October 2011 judgment, that the NSA's vacuuming of communications - both foreign and domestic - was unconstitutional, violating the fourth amendment. While the NSA did not stop surveillance, the court's ruling meant that it had to continually renew FISA court "certifications" for surveillance while it found a work-around for its own process, which the court had deemed to be illegal.
This process of extending the certifications was resource-intensive, and ended up costing the NSA's corporate partners, according to NSA documents. "Last year's problems resulted in multiple extensions to the certifications' expiration dates which cost millions of dollars for Prism providers to implement each successive extension - costs covered by Special Source Operations," said one of the Top Secret NSA newsletters, dated December 2012. Special Source Operations is the top division of the NSA that handles PRISM and other surveillance programs.
This is the first time a financial relationship has been exposed between Internet technology companies and the NSA, an agency funded by American taxpayers.
In response, a Yahoo spokesperson said that "Federal law requires the U.S. government to reimburse providers for costs incurred to respond to compulsory legal process imposed by the government. We have requested reimbursement consistent with this law." Google declined to comment on the funding situation, only stating that it is awaiting a response by the U.S. government to their prior petition to publish more national security request data. Microsoft stated that it only complies with national security requests because it is required by law, and not because of reimbursement funds.
Who do you think looks worse in this situation - tech companies like Google and Yahoo, or the Federal Government? Let us know in the comments.