, former director of the NSA and deputy director of the CIA. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Apple's Connection To Prism And Its 5000 Data Requests

Making headlines around the world this June, the Apple Prism debacle promises to continue garnering controversy. The United States National Security Agency has had a secret project called Prism for an unknown since 2007. This clandestine agency was unheard of until June 2013, when a former CIA worker and NSA contractor blew the whistle on mass electronic surveillance by the company. Edward Snowden is now in hiding but what he has revealed has left the entire world talking.

The leaks have revealed the media giants Yahoo, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft have all been receiving requests for information on private citizens by the government. Social media giants like Facebook initially denied any involvement but starting coming clean as the Snowden story began to snowball.

Apple alone has admitted to receiving up to 5000 data requests by the U.S. government in 6 months alone. The company insists phone calls and FaceTime services are so secure that they themselves can't retrieve the encrypted data, let alone pass it along to government agencies. A spokesperson for Apple has said they were unaware of the existence of Prism until the media began asking about it on June 7, 2013.

However, they have complied when they believed it to be right to do so in cases like missing children, potential suicide threats where the person in question's location was unknown or even missing Alzheimer patients. The fact that is that all of these companies knew more than they initially let on. Without a whistler, most of their consumers would never even have questioned the invasion of their privacy. How much of it has already been invaded remains to be seen.

The NSA's Prism Data Collection System Exposed