The U.S. National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation have access to servers at Google, Facebook and other major Internet services, collecting audio, video, email and other content for surveillance, the Washington Post and the Guardian reported on Thursday.
The surveillance is taking place in real time under a classified program called PRISM, which was begun in 2007 to investigate foreign threats to the U.S., the reports said. Most of the major Internet services, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Skype, Apple and AOL as well as Google and Facebook, knowingly participate in PRISM, according to the Post and the Guardian.
"The program facilitates extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information," the Guardian reported. The document obtained by the newspapers refers to "strong growth" in the program in recent years, with a specific reference to "exponential" growth in its use on Skype servers, for instance.
The Post report came from a leak by an intelligence officer, who supplied the newspaper with PowerPoint slides about PRISM, the story said. Both newspapers posted some of those slides with their articles. The document is recent, with a date of April 2013.
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