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If they pay for more access than is required, why wasn't that in the documents Snowden dumped? Instead, we saw the normal court rulings requiring companies to comply with data access requests.

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I mean, paying Microsoft (among the rest of the tech giants) for more access than is required was in the leaks, in the form of the PRISM program.

You don't understand PRISM. PRISM was a system for processing the data that the companies were legally required to send.

PRISM is/was a small program. "Upstream" programs is the what most should be worried about and goes sort of around companies (and anyone/anything else).

Though, some companies are handed a court order to "share" their data (quarterly, about 80 companies so far). And NSA has standard rates for this.

They don't "share" the data, and the NSA doesn't pay for it. The slides clearly show that the data requests are consumed by the FBI, which is the organization that the companies deal with.

Because Snowden dropped the infinity motherload: a complete information drop, accurate well into 2018, all questions answered, all suspicions allayed.

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