There is no way that this is just some nice interface for court ordered collections. Watch the Washington Post video with the (Pulitzer Prize) author Barton Gellman.
Gellman says that "We did hold back quite a bit from this story" and then later goes on to explain the reason the companies joined ... "The law does provide that they can give access and a secret surveillance court can make them give access, but in a situation that you have a clandestine program and a very rich and powerful component ... They don't want to litigate this with Facebook, they don't want a chance of it leaking ... Facebook also being a highly regulated industry, having all kinds of issues with privacy and whatever else doesn't want to antagonize the government, so they negotiate it. Now Apple took .. 5 years .. I don't know what happened, but Microsoft joined in 2007 and Apple didn't do it until the end of 2012."
Unless the author, Gellman, exaggerated the story it is very clear that this is well beyond FISA court ordered surveillance.
If Page's & Zuckerberg's denials are somewhat truthful it means there is a compromise in the traffic streams themselves.
Gellman says that "We did hold back quite a bit from this story" and then later goes on to explain the reason the companies joined ... "The law does provide that they can give access and a secret surveillance court can make them give access, but in a situation that you have a clandestine program and a very rich and powerful component ... They don't want to litigate this with Facebook, they don't want a chance of it leaking ... Facebook also being a highly regulated industry, having all kinds of issues with privacy and whatever else doesn't want to antagonize the government, so they negotiate it. Now Apple took .. 5 years .. I don't know what happened, but Microsoft joined in 2007 and Apple didn't do it until the end of 2012."
Unless the author, Gellman, exaggerated the story it is very clear that this is well beyond FISA court ordered surveillance.
If Page's & Zuckerberg's denials are somewhat truthful it means there is a compromise in the traffic streams themselves.