Lavanya Akkalatho Dengudu I

A top-secret surveillance program gives the National Security Agency surreptitious access to customer information held by Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, Google, Facebook, and other Internet companies, according to a pair of new reports.The program, code-named PRISM, reportedly allows NSA analysts to peruse exabytes of confidential user data held by Silicon Valley firms by typing in search terms. PRISM reports have been used in 1,477 items in President Obama s daily briefing last year, according to an internal presentation to the NSA s Signals Intelligence Directorate obtained by the Washington Post and the Guardian newspapers.Joe Sullivan, Facebook s chief security officer, said We do not provide any government organization with direct access to Facebook servers. When Facebook is asked for data or information about specific individuals, we carefully scrutinise any such request for compliance with all applicable laws, and provide information only to the extent required by law. A Google spokesman said We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. Excerpt from top-secret PRISM presentation. Click for larger image This afternoon s disclosure of PRISM follows another report yesterday that revealed the existence of another top-secret NSA program that vacuums up records of millions of phone calls made inside the United States.