Glenn Greenwald, who’s speculative reporting is so bad he had to quit and move to England to write for one of their rags, wrote a story last week about how the NSA has a sort of a backdoor access to sites like Google, Facebook, etc and is able to farm our personal information.

You might no that when all of this was coming up the first time back in 2005 or so I told readers that the NSA had been mining information since the 70s, from phone records and that all of it had been approved by congress and successive congresses since then. The difference here of of course is that access was monitored by court order under FISA to protect the right to privacy.

Greenwald’s “bombshell” was that the NSA had now wiggled unfettered access to these tech companies data stores so that it could grab info willy-nilly, under a program named PRISM.

Since then we have found out it simply isn’t true.

“While everyone was busily losing their shpadoinkle on Twitter and the blogs, Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Yahoo, Microsoft, Paltalk, AOL and Apple all announced in separate statements that not only were they unaware of any PRISM program, but they also confirmed that there’s no way the government had infiltrated the privately-owned servers maintained by these companies. Furthermore, Google wrote, “Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday.” Google also described how it will occasionally and voluntarily hand over user data to the government, but only after it’s been vetted and scrutinized by Google’s legal team.”

As I said before, Greenwald was usually off then and it looks like he’s off now.

More here.

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