Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page Slam 'Outrageous' PRISM Reports
The leaders of the country's largest technology companies are apparently taking personally allegations that they are cooperating in a covert program that funnels users' information to the government.
Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page, the chief executive officiers of Facebook and Google, respectively, each issued strongly worded statements late Friday, denying any involvement in the so-called PRISM program.
"I want to respond personally to the outrageous press reports about PRISM,"Zuckerberg wrote in a public Facebook message that was liked 69,000 times in the 21 minutes after it was posted. "Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers."
Page similarly pushed back in a blog post cosigned by Google's chief lawyer, David Drummond, titled "What the...?"
"Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users' data are false, period," the Google executive wrote.
Late Thursday, The Washington Post and The Guardian each published separate stories on the secret surveillance program, reporting that it siphons text, photographs and other digital information from nine major U.S. Internet companies -- Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple -- and allows the U.S. government to monitor users' online activities. The original version of the Post's story suggested the firms were voluntarily giving the government direct access to their servers -- a claim the paper later seemed to hedge.
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EVEN THOUGH
PRISM Spying Denials From Tech Companies Baffle Security Experts
NEW YORK -- When Mark Klein went to work as a technician at an AT&T communications center in San Francisco in the fall of 2003, his company entrusted him with a key to every door but one: room 641A.
Access to that room, he later testified in a court deposition, was restricted to employees who had security clearances from the National Security Agency, the vast government department that scans the world's communications.
But even though he wasn't permitted to enter the secured room, Klein says he was directly involved in ensuring that it achieved its function: making sure that all of the Internet traffic reaching the facility, including emails and online chats, could be seen and analyzed by the government spying agency.
Klein's testimony -- recounted in court documents that are part of a federal lawsuit against the NSA by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group -- was cited in the case as proof of a contention that now has greater currency than ever: Klein's account, the EFF claims, amounts to proof that AT&T collaborated with the NSA in the surveillance of the domestic communications of millions of Americans.
The particular lawsuit in which Klein appears as witness has been moving at glacial speed through federal district court in San Francisco. But his testimony now has special resonance as Americans absorb reports that indicate the NSA has for years tapped into the networks of telephone and Internet companies to collect vast stores of information in its quest to identify and track terrorists.
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