The Uncertainty Baked Into NSA Surveillance—and the Internet

Over the weekend, more details emerged about the U.S. federal government’s no-longer-secret digital-surveillance program code-named PRISM. The project gave the National Security Agency (NSA) and other agencies unprecedented access to data, like emails and chats, going through popular services owned by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and other Internet giants. After this additional information about PRISM seeped out, it seems possible that ignorance may have been a key part of the project: that Internet companies involved were kept in the dark about a project they were directly assisting—or not directly assisting, depending on how you