Facebook has nothing to do with PRISM. That's what Mark Zuckerberg said for a second time on Tuesday.
At Facebook's annual shareholder meeting, the company's founder and CEO said pretty much what he said last week.
"We don’t work directly with the NSA, or with any other program," he said. "Nor do we proactively give user information to anyone, nor has anyone approached us to do that."
Zuckerberg added that no agency has "direct access" to Facebook's servers. But that doesn't necessarily close the book on PRISM, the secret NSA program that allegedly allows the NSA to wiretap the communications of Internet companies' foreign users.
As we reported on Saturday, PRISM may well work like a data-ingestion API. Saying that Facebook doesn't "proactively" give user data away doesn't rule that out at all.
"I think that's clever wording," privacy researcher Ashkan Soltani told Mashable. "I think Zuckerberg is saying 'we're not doing this proactively for our own health, we're under order to do so.'"
As Soltani points out, Zuckerberg's statement is in line with what Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper told NBC News on Saturday.
Asked how the surveillance programs work, Clapper said: "The Internet, the service providers –- I’ll speak generically -– are doing this, but it is done under a court order and under legally mandated, legislatively mandated procedures. These are very precise, they’re not indefinite and they have to be renewed and the court has to approve them."
Meanwhile, after its own repeated denials, on Tuesday Google sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder asking permission to be more transparent about government requests stemming from secret surveillance programs.