more out the back. Without the companies’ knowledge or cooperation, the Snowden revelations that fall showed that the NSA, and its British counterpart, GCHQ, were sucking up companies’ data from the internet’s undersea fiber-optic cables and switches. In agency jargon, this was called “upstream” collection, as opposed to “downstream” methods like Prism, in which agencies demand customers’ data from companies through secret court orders. In a single day, top-secret NSA slides showed that—unbeknownst to Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google—the agency had collected “444,743 Yahoo email address
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