Google Inc. (GOOG) and Facebook Inc. (FB) said that their organisations were not aware about the existence of such a program named PRISM, until the news came to light.
On Thursday, The Washington Post reported that the National Security Agency or NSA and FBI have a direct line to the central servers of Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo (YHOO), Google, Facebook, Apple (AAPL), AOL (AOL), Paltalk, Skype, and YouTube. PRISM - a secret US intelligence program, was used by NSA to access the emails, documents, photographs and other sensitive data of users from all nine involved companies.
Contradicting to the report, major tech companies issued statements denying participation in any government program and say they only give over information when required by law.
In a post on his profile on Facebook yesterday, its founder Mark Zuckerberg said, "Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers. We have never received a blanket request or court order from any government agency asking for information or metadata in bulk, like the one Verizon reportedly received. And if we did, we would fight it aggressively. We hadn't even heard of PRISM before yesterday."
On government requests for data, Zuckerberg said, "When governments ask Facebook for data, we review each request carefully to make sure they always follow the correct processes and all applicable laws, and then only provide the information if is required by law."
In the same way, Google Co-founder and CEO Larry Page and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond in a post on the search giant's official blog said, "First, we have not joined any program that would give the US government or any other government direct access to our servers.Indeed, the US government does not have direct access or a 'back door' to the information stored in our data centres.We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday."
They further wrote that "Until this week's reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received-an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users' call records. We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users' Internet activity on such a scale is completely false. Finally, this episode confirms what we have long believed - there needs to be a more transparent approach."
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