“棱镜”计划兄弟项目曝光 美监控海底光缆收集情报

"You Should Use Both," the slide said, in an apparent message to NSA personnel.

At the bottom was a description of "PRISM," the previously reported program that collects data from the servers” of tech companies such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, Skype, PalTalk, AOL, YouTube and Apple.

Some of these tech companies have strongly denied being involved with the NSA's spying activities.

PRISM — which could be considered “downstream” collection because the data is already processed by tech companies

At the top was a blurb on "Upstream," which it described as "collection of communications on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past."

The Post article suggested the latter was part of an effort to tap into the fiber-optic cables that contain gobs of voice and Internet data.

Upstream lists "Fairview, Stormbrew, Blarney and Oakstar" as its sources.

According to The Washington Post, Blarney gathers up metadata on the Internet as part of “an ongoing collection program that leverages IC [intelligence community] and commercial partnerships to gain access and exploit foreign intelligence obtained from global networks.”

The slide contains a rough map of North America, showing the underseas cables fanning out from the West and East coasts of the United States, to the rest of the world.

These undersea cables are essential to worldwide data flows – and to the surveillance capabilities of the U.S. government and its allies.

Agreements with private companies protect U.S. access to cables’ data for surveillance

This “Network Security Agreement,” signed in September 2003 by Global Crossing, became a model for other deals over the past decade as foreign investors increasingly acquired pieces of the world’s telecommunications infrastructure.

The security agreement for Global Crossing, whose fiber-optic network connected 27 nations and four continents, required the company to have a “Network Operations Center” on U.S. soil that could be visited by government officials with 30 minutes of warning. Surveillance requests, meanwhile, had to be handled by U.S. citizens screened by the government and sworn to secrecy — in many cases prohibiting information from being shared even with the company’s executives and directors.