It was entirely wrong. The slides he published very clearly showed that it was an integration project with the FBI. The companies sent the FBI data for specific accounts under court order, and that is the only data that PRISM ingested. Greenwald thought the NSA could access arbitrary accounts' data. He could easily have gotten this right (like the New York Times did the very next day and CNET and the rest of the tech media shortly after) if he had bothered to figure out what each piece of the diagrams meant or if he had consulted anybody who understood computers at all instead of just a high school dropout SharePoint admin — you know, journalism.
IIRC that was Snowden’s claim too and he worked on it (I don’t have an exact text quote since this is from the Citizenfour doc), and the claim is that the data can be requested as long as the individual is suspected, which can be for something as frivolous as a ML look-alike match on traffic patterns.
Also the key piece of the reporting was on the abuse of the Patriot’s act. Without Greenwald and Snowden the New York Times wouldn’t even touch the topic.
> IIRC that was Snowden’s claim too and he worked on it
Snowden did not work on PRISM, nor did he ever claim to. He had failed a test necessary to even see data collected under Section 702, so he couldn't so much as see the data that PRISM ingested. https://www.vice.com/en/article/mb9mza/exclusive-snowden-tri...
> and the claim is that the data can be requested as long as the individual is suspected, which can be for something as frivolous as a ML look-alike match on traffic patterns.
No. It goes through the normal court order process where the company will push back if it isn't legit. Section 702 court orders can only request data for non-Americans outside the US, and the company that gets the order will have a good idea of whether this is true for a particular account.
> Also the key piece of the reporting was on the abuse of the Patriot’s act.
The only illegal US program that they exposed was phone metadata collection. The pair of illiterates thought that PRISM was something supremely sinister (that anybody with the most rudimentary computing and reading skills can easily figure out it isn't), so they hyped that story a lot. People corrected Greenwald on Twitter on day one, but it took years for him to understand how much he botched that story, and his ego prevented him from issuing a correction. Instead, he just stopped talking about it and now only ever mentions phone metadata. https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-case-for-a-pardon-of-ed...
https://images.theconversation.com/files/26668/original/ngww...
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies...
https://www.cnet.com/news/no-evidence-of-nsas-direct-access-...