US tech giants knew of NSA data collection, agency's top lawyer insists

The senior lawyer for the National Security Agency stated that US technology companies were fully aware of the surveillance agency’s widespread collection of data.

Rajesh De, the NSA general counsel, said all communications content and associated metadata harvested by the NSA under a 2008 surveillance law occurred with the knowledge of the companies -- both for the Internet collection program known as Prism and for the so-called “upstream” collection of communications moving across the Internet.

Asked during a hearing of the US government’s institutional privacy watchdog if collection under the law, known as Section 702 or the FISA Amendments Act, occurred with the “full knowledge and assistance of any company from which information is obtained,” De replied: “Yes.” De explained: “Prism was an internal government term that as the result of leaks became the public term,” De said. “Collection under this program was a compulsory legal process that any recipient company would receive.”

After the hearing, De added that service providers also know and receive legal compulsions surrounding NSA’s harvesting of communications data not from companies but directly in transit across the Internet under 702 authority.