NSA Prism Spying Scandal: Tech Companies Struggle to Open Up

The phone calls began late in the morning, Silicon Valley time, on June 6. Representatives of nine leading U.S. technology companies received a flurry of calls and e-mails from reporters at the Guardian and the Washington Post, asking them to comment on explosive stories they would soon publish. Their reports, based on government documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, alleged that the country’s leading Internet firms were giving the NSA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation “direct access” to their servers and thus to the e-mails, photos, and other private information of hundreds of millions of users around the world. The papers gave the companies roughly two hours to respond, according to spokespeople for four of the businesses.

The tech companies rushed to deny that the NSA surveillance program, called Prism, operated the way the papers and leaked NSA documents described—that they had given the U.S. government carte blanche access to their systems. Since refining their denials, they’ve moved a behind-the-scenes battle further into the open. In the past week, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo! have issued reports specifying how many information requests they’ve received from law enforcement, an effort to show that the government appeals for data are targeted.