[liberationtech] NSA has direct access to tech giants' systems for user data, secret ppt reveals

[Eugen Leitl]

On Thu, Jun 06, 2013 at 09:23:03PM -0700, x z wrote:
> What surprised me is how Guardian and Washington Post cover this "story".
> The Power Point slides looks laughable to me. Maybe I should interpret
> "direct access to servers of firms" as like when I'm typing this email I am
> also having *a direct access* to Gmail's servers.

It's a little more direct than that.
Approaches like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A are
really rather expensive, so it makes sense to move the
intercept capabilities to the providers themselves,
on a need-to-know basis, and serve them with a gagging 
order. 

If you think this is a laughing matter, you have a pretty
strange sense of humor.
 
> This either a ploy by some "pro-privacy" extremist or a prank by somebody
> who's tired of these hyperbole privacy outcries.

You must realize that placating pabulum doesn't really fly
here, so I would reexamine why you are reading this list.