Yesterday, a scandal broke out in the USA in which several large companies, incl Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC),, were accused that they provided the NSA (National Security Agency) with confidential data of the users of its services, data that were stored in their own servers. Everything was done through a secret program called PRISM, the companies Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube offering unrestricted access to its servers, the NSA being able to access emails, chat conversations, video clips, pictures, video conferences and just about everything you can do on a terminal mobile.
PRISM is an heir, in one sense, to a history of intelligence alliances with as many as 100 trusted US companies since the 1970s. The NSA calls these Special Source Operations, and PRISM falls under that rubric. The Silicon Valley operation works alongside a parallel program, code-named BLARNEY, that gathers up "metadata" — address packets, device signatures and the like — as it streams past choke points along the backbone of the Internet. BLARNEY's top-secret program summary, set down alongside a cartoon insignia of a shamrock and a leprechaun hat, describes it as "an ongoing collection program that leverages IC [intelligence community] and commercial partnerships to gain access and exploit foreign intelligence obtained from global networks .”
Apple has been part of this program since 2012, Microsoft has been part of it since 2007, but all companies will deny involvement. Apple has already done it through its spokesperson, stating that it has nothing to do with the secret PRISM program, whose existence it knows nothing about, and of course it has not given the government access to its servers. The interesting part is that the data collected by PRISM are often part of the daily security report that reaches the US president's desk, so we are talking about extremely important information.
Apple states in its TOS that it reserves the right to provide information to government agencies in the event that a person is criminally investigated or endangers national security, so there is a legal gate for surveillance. Considering that we are talking about the US government and strictly secret programs of the NSA, the truth will never come out, but everything must be considered strictly informative, because the US has nothing to do with Romania.
