The slide says "collection directly from the servers." If you look at the context it is comparing traditional SIGINT wiretapping with PRISM. Now it seems clear (as you suggested) that this refers not to the method(direct access) but rather to the provenance(where does it come from, directly not indirectly from wiretaps) of the data.
I'm not sure what to make of this article though: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-com... Everything in this article from the Wash Post directly contradicts what the government and the companies are claiming. It really is real time, direct access to data without any mediation from company staff at all.
The article seems credible as it comes from multiple intelligence sources and executives(!) at the company. I don't really expect executives to lie in a way would raise suspicions about their company like that. If PRISM was really just a dropbox executives would be very happy to say so(in private at least so reporters could calm people down)
It is a lot easier to imagine intelligence sources saying it is just a dropbox than executives at companies admitting they installed a back door for the government.
What would make sense to me is that the company is able to "mediate" the FISA warrant, not the access request itself. Kind of like the TLS CA architecture; once you go and "trust" the root CA you would automatically trust requests that were signed by that CA.
Presumably they could ensure that their automated mediator limits the data collection only to things approved by the FISA warrant, in this case there would be no need to keep manually double-checking as the computer would do that for the company.
Likewise the automated system could continue to update the data in the "drop box". Think long-polling techniques or push notifications to the NSA analyst's machine.
I'm not sure what to make of this article though: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-com... Everything in this article from the Wash Post directly contradicts what the government and the companies are claiming. It really is real time, direct access to data without any mediation from company staff at all.
The article seems credible as it comes from multiple intelligence sources and executives(!) at the company. I don't really expect executives to lie in a way would raise suspicions about their company like that. If PRISM was really just a dropbox executives would be very happy to say so(in private at least so reporters could calm people down)
It is a lot easier to imagine intelligence sources saying it is just a dropbox than executives at companies admitting they installed a back door for the government.
Right now, I'm undecided.