Hacker News Reader

Comment by davesean | Hacker News Reader

No one denied complying with 702 orders. The main contention about PRISM isn't that the entities receiving data requests knew that they were receiving these requests, the main contention was/is about the "direct access" allegations which is what these companies actually denied, that and knowing the government codename for the program.

Bad reporting.

View on HN

The second paragraph of the article claims that companies knew about "upstream" collection as well. This is, from my understanding, the main point, as the Google engineer Brandon Downey issued the very harsh statement, and I quote, "fuck these guys", when the infamous smiley-face slide leaked.

EDIT: Apparently the "upstream" collection does not refer to the third capture method in question, which exploited the fact that Google did not (at the time) encrypt its internal communications.

iirc "upstream" refers to collection out on the Internet - the "fuck those guys" program is MUSCULAR, which is the tapping of private interdatacenter links.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upstream_collection vs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUSCULAR

The "fuck you"s were directed at interceptions under executive order 12333 which as the second to last paragraph makes clear was not a subject of discussion.

PRISM and UPSTREAM featured in the same slide which would explain them being discussed together, but UPSTREAM isn't subject to tech firms' whims so the discussion might have been concerning telecom firms as well.

The reporting isn't clear, best read the transcript when available.

I stand corrected. Thank you for clarifying.

I am assuming that this

> After the hearing, De said that the same knowledge, and associated legal processes, also apply when the NSA harvests communications data not from companies directly but in transit across the internet, under Section 702 authority.

doesn't imply that Facebook is informed when an "upstream collection" request is made to a telco in relation to a Facebook user, but rather that the telco is. It's pretty unclear though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com