The NSA surveillance programme that collects your data from 9 tech companies — without telling you.
PRISM is a US government programme that lets the NSA collect your stored emails, photos, videos, documents, and messages directly from Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Yahoo, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and PalTalk — and the companies are legally forbidden from telling you it happened.
Under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the NSA sends data collection requests to participating companies. No individual court order is needed. The companies hand over stored communications for specific 'selectors' (email addresses, phone numbers). The FBI then does 'backdoor searches' of this collected data using American names and email addresses — without a warrant. The ACLU calls this 'an end-run around the Fourth Amendment.'
By 2013, the NSA was logging over 2,000 PRISM-based reports per month. Google, Apple, and Meta collectively shared 3.16 million accounts with US authorities over 10 years (Proton analysis, 2025). Including FISA orders, the total rises to 6.9 million accounts. FISA content requests to Meta alone increased 2,171% since 2014.
Microsoft (since 2007), Yahoo (2008), Google (2009), Facebook (2009), PalTalk (2009), YouTube (2010), Skype (2011), AOL (2011), Apple (2012). These dates come from leaked NSA slides published by The Guardian and The Washington Post in 2013.
If you use any service from these companies — Gmail, iCloud, OneDrive, Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube — your stored data can be collected by the NSA without your knowledge. The company cannot tell you. There is no notification. The only protection is end-to-end encryption that the provider cannot decrypt, and even then, metadata (who you talk to, when, from where) is still accessible.
We don't know the full scale because the programme is secret. The government has refused to estimate how many Americans are affected. What we know: the FBI conducts tens of thousands of backdoor searches of American data per year. In 2023, Congress reauthorised Section 702 despite civil liberties objections from the ACLU, EFF, and over 100 organisations.