Verizon spying

Verizon: Spy Order Prevents Us From Admitting to Spy Order

Google, Apple, AOL and Facebook All Insist They Never Heard of PRISM

Anti- war,

8 June, 2013

The companies complicit in the NSA’s broad, overarching surveillance of the American public have been slow to comment on a program which, as senators are quick to tell you, has been hoovering up your personal information for years without you being any the wiser.

Verizon was the first to go public, at least sort of. Though the company refused to either confirm or deny that the leaked spy order was real, they did point out that the spy order “forbids Verizon from revealing the order’s existence.”

That’s a little more than we were able to get out of Google, Apple, AOL or Facebook, all caught up on the PRISM side, where a leaked “top secret” document confirmed all of their involvement. Each company insisted that they had “never even heard of” PRISM.

The denials aren’t even close to credible, but they are all eerily similar, all making it a point to say that the government isn’t accessing their servers “directly,” an oddly specific claim if, as they also insist, they’ve never even heard of it. It seems likely thisisn’t a coincidence.

Yahoo! didn’t deny involvement in PRISM, but included the same “direct access” denial. Microsoft claimed they “don’t participate” in PRISM, despite the document, whose authenticity was confirmed by the Director of National Intelligence earlier today, saying Microsoft not only does participate, but was indeed the first company to do so, in 2008.

Paltalk stands alone at the moment in having issued no statement at all about the matter, meaning they also stand alone in not having said anything readily disproven by the already known facts.