Reports say US taps into servers of internet giants

Reports in the Washington Post and The Guardian said US intelligence services tapped directly in to the servers of those companies and six others to extract emails, voice calls, videos, photos and other communications from their customers without the need for a warrant.
The secret programme, called PRISM, is the leading source of raw material for the National Security Agency, the secretive US intelligence operation that monitors electronic communications, said the Washington Post. The newspaper said its source for the story was an internal presentation that it obtained.
They surfaced amid an uproar over an earlier report by the British daily newspaper the Guardian of FBI requests of details of all the phone calls that were placed over the network of the leading US telecommunications company Verizon.
PRISM was initiated in 2007 starting with Microsoft. The other companies which allegedly cooperated with the NSA and FBI are Yahoo, AOL, Skype, YouTube and PalTalk, a smaller provider that is said to have hosted significant traffic during the Arab Spring and in the current Syrian crisis.
While the main target of the dragnet was supposed to be foreign nationals suspected of involvement in terror, the reports said that enforcement of this rule was extremely lax and that agency protocols included surveillance of every person on a suspect's contact list, which would have included many Americans.//DPA