• Slew of court challenges threaten NSA’s relationship with tech firms | World news | theguardian.com
    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/17/nsa-court-challenges-tech-firms

    That’s what the conservative group Judicial Watch is attempting. The organization filed a class-action suit last month against the internet companies named as participating in the NSA’s Prism program, including Microsoft, AOL, Facebook, Google and Apple. Cases like that have long frightened the NSA.

    The NSA and its allies in Congress have gone to great lengths to legally shield the private-sector telephone and internet companies it works with. A 2008 law that broadened the scope of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as the Fisa Amendments Act, retroactively immunized any participating telecom firm from legal liability. According to an internal NSA history of the program, several firms specifically requested NSA compel them to comply through Fisa court orders, fearing an eventual court case.

    Underscoring how delicately the NSA treats the sanctity of its private-sector partners, the NSA would only refer to them even in a classified internal document as “Company A” and similar pseudonyms.

    That sensitivity exists because the telecommunications firms largely own and operate the infrastructure used to make phone calls, send emails and conduct web searches, unlike in authoritarian countries like China, North Korea and the former East Germany. Without the companies’ participation, the NSA could still perform so-called “upstream” collection, such as accessing data as it transmits, for instance, across fiberoptic cables before the companies process them. “But they can’t get a complete copy of everything without going to the companies,” Binney said.