[jsn]

You are mistaken. PRISM is specifically a program that "collects stored internet communications based on demands made to internet companies" [em. mine]. NSA wiretapping the non-public links of Google et ol was not PRISM (I'm not even sure that the name of that program was ever disclosed).

[btilly]

Not as mistaken as it appears.

The NSA placed key people into companies like Google who had security clearances that specifically forbade them from saying exactly what they were doing to higher ups. They then created systems for extracting data in an automated way based on requests from the NSA. All that executives knew was that they were doing something important for complying with law enforcement requests.

The CEOs of these companies learned about the existence of the back doors from public reporting based on Snowden's revelations. When they first heard, they issued public denials that were, as far as they knew, truthful. Their subsequent actions upon finding out that they were wrong strongly suggest that they wouldn't have approved the programs had they known what was happening.

[arebop]

[citation needed]

I see this claim is made in the Wikipedia article [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)]: "PRISM collects stored internet communications based on demands made to internet companies such as Google LLC under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to turn over any data that match court-approved search terms.[6]" but the cited source [https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-i...] does not support this assertion; on the contrary it explains "[NSA] has secretly broken into [...] Yahoo and Google". It certainly doesn't make the stronger claim you seem to suggest here that PRISM is limited to FISA requests.