The PRISM Details Matter
Please take all my upvotes.  This is the first useful article I've seen about PRISM, with the _possible_ exception of the scoop itself, but not excluding the existing analysis from the Guardian and WaPo.<p>For $20M, you can't do what Prism claims to do for $20M.  Even suppose you limited your scope only to Google, AND now you limit only to GMail, AND your development and installation costs are free, and all you're spending on is bandwidth and servers and cooling and maintenance staff, I still doubt you can read all of GMail for $20M/year.<p>Then there's the bit where they claim that analysts, what's the phrasing, "quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type".  Seriously, think for a second what it would mean to be able to do that.  Think of how that would work, in terms of network protocols.  Now go install wireshark and open a gmail window and start composing an email, or writing half of a chat (without hitting Enter).  I haven't done the experiment; maybe you can be the first and break a scoop!<p>Obviously the people who reported on PRISM have told some lies about what it does.  Either it can't do what they say it does, or it cost a lot more than $20M, or both.<p>(I don't want to minimize the seriousness of the accusations... they should be given due appraisal.  But they basically cannot be literally true as written.)<p>And look.  Google gets about 100 "requests" (legal demands) from government per working day, and responds (under legal duress) about 30 per working day in the US alone.  You think maybe some kind of workflow management software might be appropriate here, or you're imagining this all goes back and forth over email?  Or maybe you're imagining an anonymous FTP server somewhere?  Obviously the right thing to do is build a secure custom ticket-tracking system, to manage demands, push-back, authorization, fulfillment, etc.  If we want to believe it's all okay, here's a plausible story.  Maybe it's true, maybe it's not.