Washington: The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading US Internet companies, allowing investigators to examine e-mails, photos and other documents that can be used to track people and their contacts over time, The Washington Post reported on Thursday.
The highly classified anti-terrorism program, code-named PRISM, had not been disclosed publicly before. A US government source who was not authorized to comment publicly on the program confirmed its existence to Reuters late on Thursday.
The program's participants, the Post said, include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley: Microsoft Corp, Yahoo Inc, Google Inc, Facebook Inc, PalTalk, AOL Inc, Skype, YouTube and Apple Inc.
In statements released late on Thursday, Google, Apple, Yahoo and Facebook denied that the government had "direct access" to their central servers. Microsoft said it does not voluntarily participate in any government data collection and only complies "with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers.
When asked to respond, Washington Post spokeswoman Kristine Coratti said: "We stand by our story. The NSA document says what we reported."
The report came on the same day that another newspaper, Britain's Guardian, revealed that the US government is collecting telephone records of millions of Americans as part of US counterterrorism efforts.
In Washington, the Guardian report fueled an ongoing debate over whether the US government is violating citizens' privacy rights while trying to protect them from attacks. That debate is sure to escalate with the Post's report, which said the NSA and FBI are extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs to build a database involving trillions of communications by Americans.
The Post said it obtained copies of briefing slides describing the Silicon Valley operation that were intended for senior analysts in the NSA's Signals Intelligence Directorate.
The slides described the new tool as the most prolific contributor to the President's Daily Brief, which cited PRISM data in 1,477 articles in 2012.
The program was established under Republican President George W Bush in 2007 and has grown exponentially since then during President Barack Obama's administration, the Post article said.
The technology companies participate knowingly in PRISM operations, according to the Post, and are listed on one NSA slide in the order in which they became part of the program, starting with Microsoft in September 2007 and ending with Apple in October 2012.
The Post said it obtained the PowerPoint slides about PRISM and supporting materials from a career intelligence officer who wanted to expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion on privacy. "They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type," the officer said.
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