Is the NSA PRISM leak much less than it seems?

In the past few days, the super-secretive National Security Agency has been buffeted by a series of rare, damaging leaks, apparently all from one mid-level IT contractor, Edward Snowden. The most damaging revelation (so far) may be that the NSA apparently routinely collects and stores phone records of millions of Americans. But the splashiest arrived in twin articles, in The Washington Post and The Guardian, about the NSA's PRISM program.

Both newspapers reported that PRISM gave the NSA "direct access" to the servers of nine internet giants, including Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft. Those tech companies "participate knowingly" in the program, The Washington Post said, which lets the NSA reach deep inside the U.S. companies' machines to extract "audio, video, photographs, emails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person's movements and contacts over time."

That sounds scandalous, but, "it turns out, the NSA PRISM story isn't quite the bombshell that everyone said it was," says Bob Cesca at The Daily Banter. There are certainly reasons to be very concerned about government electronic surveillance, says Cesca, "but the reporting from [The Guardian's] Glenn Greenwald and The Washington Post has been shoddy and misleading."

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The first sign that something wasn't right with the story was that the tech companies strongly denied that government snoops had any access to their servers. Then, "a funny thing happened," says Ed Bott at ZDNet: Quietly — without issuing any clarification or correction — "The Post revised the story, backing down from sensational claims it made originally." Gone was the phrase "participate knowingly." The phrase "track a person's movements and contacts over time" was changed to "track foreign targets." Also erased: The claim that the NSA is "tapping directly into the central servers" of Silicon Valley giants.

Those are huge changes to slip into a story, and many of the paper's other claims appear to be wrong, too, says Bott:

The Guardian has not modified its original articles. To the contrary, Greenwald has been actively defending his reporting, and this op-ed, by Roy Greenslade, appears in Monday's Guardian: "Could The Guardian win a Pulitzer for Edward Snowden's NSA revelations?"

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said on Sunday that Snowden and Greenwald have no idea what they're talking about:

So, if PRISM doesn't give the NSA unfettered access to all our online files, Gmail messages, Facebook posts, and tracking metadata, what does it do?

Basically, "PRISM is a kick-ass GUI [graphical user interface] that allows an analyst to look at, collate, monitor, and cross-check different data types provided to the NSA from internet companies located inside the United States," says Marc Ambinder at The Week. That data is stored on U.S. servers, but "a lot of foreign intelligence runs through American companies and American servers."

And while what PRISM does, and how, may be top secret, its existence isn't, says Declan McCullough at CNET.

Still, others maintain that the PRISM leak raises "troubling questions about privacy and civil liberties that officials in Washington, insistent on near-total secrecy, have yet to address," says The New York Times:

It's this massive new power that makes Snowden's leak the most important in American history, says "Pentagon Papers" leaker Daniel Ellsberg at The Guardian.