Apple and other American tech companies denied Thursday that they would have allowed intelligence services access to their servers to obtain data about users in a surveillance program approved by the administration of Barack Obama, writes AFP today.
Washington Post reported that the FBI and the National Security Agency (NSA) in the U.S. have access through hidden gates to servers belonging to major American IT groups to monitor user activities in a secret program called PRISM, according to the source.
“We have never heard of PRISM,” said Steve Dowling, a spokesman for Apple. “We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers and any agency requesting customer data must get a court order,” he added.
NSA and FBI have access to the servers of nine Internet giants, including Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google and Facebook, to monitor the activities of foreign nationals, revealed The Washington Post and The Guardian in their Thursday editions, according to AFP.
American newspaper Washington Post has been contacted by a former employee of an intelligence agency who has provided various documents, including a PowerPoint presentation showing the partnership between the NSA and Internet companies.
Contacted by AFP, the social network Facebook has denied the allegations on Thursday. “When Facebook is asked for data or information about specific individuals, we carefully scrutinise any such request for compliance with all applicable laws,” said Joe Sullivan, responsible for the social network security. When authorities submit requests to search for information, Facebook “provide information only to the extent required by law,” he added.
Google has said in a statement: “First, we have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government—or any other government—direct access to our servers… Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law. Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process.”
“If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data we don’t participate in it,” reads a statement posted by Microsoft Corporation on Customer Privacy.
“We do not provide the government with direct access to our servers, systems, or network,” reads Yahoo! statement.
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