The NSA began PRISM in 2007 under the Bush administration after the Protect America Act and operated it under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. The program compelled participating U.S. technology companies—including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Apple, Skype, YouTube and AOL—to provide communications associated with government selectors. Leaked briefing slides identified Yahoo, Google and Microsoft as responsible for 98% of PRISM production, while NSA documents described the system as its leading source of raw intelligence and as accounting for 91% of internet traffic acquired under Section 702. The FBI’s Data Intercept Technology Unit collected the material from providers and forwarded it to the NSA.
NSA contractor Edward Snowden disclosed PRISM documents to The Guardian and The Washington Post on June 6, 2013, revealing the program’s scale and prompting global scrutiny of U.S. surveillance. Officials including Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and President Barack Obama defended the program as lawful, targeted at non-U.S. persons abroad and subject to FISA Court, congressional and executive oversight. However, Clapper later acknowledged that his March 12, 2013 Senate statement that the NSA did not knowingly collect data on millions of Americans was misleading. The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board’s July 2, 2014 report said PRISM collected communications to or from specific selectors rather than bulk internet traffic, but NSA, FBI and CIA “back-door” searches could query already-collected data using U.S. person identifiers. Section 702 was renewed through December 2017, leaving continuing debates over incidental collection, oversight and privacy safeguards.
