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For those of you who always thought the NSA was looking over your shoulder, you were probably right. Big brother has everything we do on-line, on the phone and on our cell phones data mined. This PRISM data mining program cost the tech companies a lot of money for compliance and of course there is a paper trail for that. This is new information released by Edward Snowden to The Guardian. He is hiding out in Russia.

Top-secret files show first evidence of financial relationship:
• Prism companies include Google and Yahoo, says NSA
• Costs were incurred after 2011 Fisa court ruling

NSA paid millions to cover Prism compliance costs for tech companies | World news | The Guardian

The National Security Agency paid millions of dollars to cover the costs of major internet companies involved in the Prism surveillance program after a court ruled that some of the agency's activities were unconstitutional, according to top-secret material passed to the Guardian.

The technology companies, which the NSA says includes Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook, incurred the costs to meet new certification demands in the wake of the ruling from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (Fisa) court.

The October 2011 judgment, which was declassified on Wednesday by the Obama administration, found that the NSA's inability to separate purely domestic communications from foreign traffic violated the fourth amendment.

While the ruling did not concern the Prism program directly, documents passed to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden describe the problems the decision created for the agency and the efforts required to bring operations into compliance. The material provides the first evidence of a financial relationship between the tech companies and the NSA.

The intelligence agency requires the Fisa court to sign annual "certifications" that provide the legal framework for surveillance operations. But in the wake of the court judgment these were only being renewed on a temporary basis while the agency worked on a solution to the processes that had been ruled illegal.

An NSA newsletter entry, marked top secret and dated December 2012, discloses the huge costs this entailed. "Last year's problems resulted in multiple extensions to the certifications' expiration dates which cost millions of dollars for Prism providers to implement each successive extension – costs covered by Special Source Operations," it says.
Fisa 1 An NSA newsletter entry dated December 2012 disclosing the costs of new certification demands. Photograph: guardian.co.uk


Much more at the above link: screenshots of the docs, etc.