Following the leaking of a court order that showed that the US National Security Agency (NSA) has been harvesting mobile phone call data from the carrier Verizon (and possibly others too), new revelations by The Washington Post claim that the US authorities have been actively aided in the surveillance activities by nine of the biggest brands on the internet.
The so-called PRISM project has been active since 2007 and allows the NSA to access email, chat, file transfers, social network data and other information that users might have presumed were to be private.
Members of PRISM include early-signers Microsoft and Yahoo, Facebook, PalTalk and Google, which joined in 2009, and YouTube, Skype, AOL and Apple, all of which joined later. The report seen by the Post states that DropBox will be signing up soon.
Among its revalations the Post claims that the NSA has access to Google's servers and is able to mine the data passing through them. Google denies the presence of such a back door.
A Google spokesperson told the Guardian and Washington Post: "We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government ‘back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data."
Apple also denied the claims, telling broadcaster CNBC: "We have never heard of PRISM. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers."
Facebook also said that it does not allow "direct access" to its servers.
"When Facebook is asked for data or information about specific individuals, we carefully scrutinise any such request for compliance with all applicable laws, and provide information only to the extent required by law," the company said in a statement.
