I'm just glad PRISM is nothing but an extremely expensive Rube Goldberg contraption for responding to warrants. Golly, why did Yahoo bother going to court to fight the notion that when a court issues a warrant ...
"Yahoo also felt that warrantless requests placed discretion for data collection 'entirely in the hands of the Executive Branch without prior judicial involvement' thereby ceding to the government 'overly broad power that invites abuse” and possible errors that would result in scooping up data of U.S. citizens as well.'
I think you may have accidentally moved the goalposts here. The claim wasn't that PRISM was restricted to warrants; it handles what are in effect court orders (more specifically, FISA collection directives) which are not warrants.
When stories about PRISM first leaked, there was intense speculation that it was a system that gave the NSA direct access to servers.
What I don't understand, is that if the NSA is tapping all the routers why do they need PRISM at all? Or is the haystack so large they tap the whole thing AND collect from the providers.
"Yahoo also felt that warrantless requests placed discretion for data collection 'entirely in the hands of the Executive Branch without prior judicial involvement' thereby ceding to the government 'overly broad power that invites abuse” and possible errors that would result in scooping up data of U.S. citizens as well.'
Oh.