The war over how to spin revelations of the National Security Agency's latest spying program has officially begun.

On the heels of media reports that the NSA has gained access to the servers of nine leading tech companies -- enabling the spy agency to examine emails, video, photographs, and other digital communications -- Google has issued a strongly worded statement denying that the company granted the government "direct access" to its servers. That statement goes so far as to say that the company hasn't even heard of "a program called PRISM until yesterday." 

At first glance, Google's statement is difficult to believe. Senior intelligence officials have confirmed the program's existence, and Google's logo is prominently listed on internal NSA documents describing participating companies. But Google may be engaging in a far more subtle public relations strategy than outright denial.

Google's statement hinges on three key points: that it did not provide the government with "direct access" to its servers, that it did not set up a "back door" for the NSA, and that it provides "user data to governments only in accordance with the law." 

According to Chris Soghoian, a tech expert and privacy researcher at the American Civil Liberties Union, the phrase "direct access" connotes a very specific form of access in the IT-world: unrestricted, unfettered access to information stored on Google servers. In order to run a system such as PRISM, Soghoian explains, such access would not be required, and Google's denial that it provided "direct access" does not necessarily imply that the company is denying having participated in the program. Typically, the only people having "direct access" to the servers of a company like Google would be its engineers. (Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg has issued a similarly worded denial in which he says his company has not granted the government "direct access" to its servers," but his language mirrors Google's denial about direct access.)

A similar logic applies to Google's denial that it set up a "back door." According to Soghoian, the phrase "back door" is a term of art that describes a way to access a system that is neither known by the system's owner nor documented. By denying that it set up a back door, Google is not denying that it worked with the NSA to set up a system through which the agency could access the company's data.

According to Soghoian, the NSA could have gained access to tech company servers by working with the companies to set up something similar to an API -- a tool these firms use to give developers limited access to company data. Google has denied that an API was used, but that denial doesn't exclude the possibility that a similar tool was used.

To protect itself against allegations that it inappropriately compromised user data, Google further notes in its statement that the company provides "user data to governments only in accordance with the law." Despite the outrage directed at the NSA and the Obama administration, PRISM -- as currently described -- is in all likelihood within the bounds of the law. In the aftermath of the 2005 disclosure that the Bush administration had carried out a warrantless wiretapping program, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 and the Protect America Act of 2007. But those laws did not outlaw the kinds of actions carried out by PRISM.

As for Google's claim to have never heard of PRISM, would the intelligence officials who reportedly collaborated with Google have used the program's actual codename?

The tech companies alleged to have participated in PRISM aren't the only ones who appear to be spinning PRISM to their advantage.

On Friday, U.S. government sources told Reuters that PRISM was used to foil a 2009 plot to bomb the New York City subway. In all likelihood, such counter-leaks will continue in the days ahead as intelligence officials try to portray the program as essential to national security.

Welcome to the PRISM spin war.

If the country's future is its children, Syria's reconciliation and reconstruction will fall to a group of young people forced from schools -- a "lost generation."

It's a dramatic change for a country with a relatively high standard of education. A new Human Rights Watch report notes that "In 2010, about 93 percent of all eligible children were enrolled in primary education, and 67 percent in secondary education. Before the war, literacy rates among young people were high: approximately 95 percent of the population between ages 15 and 24 could read and write." Early in his presidency, Bashar al-Assad initiated a series of education reforms, increasing the quality of instruction and expanding opportunities for collegiate education.

It's difficult to separate higher education from Ba'ath Party privilege, but it also "was linked to social mobility and the attainment of middle-class status," according to a recent study of refugee students and academics conducted by the University of California, Davis Human Rights Initiative and the Institute for International Education's Scholar Rescue Fund. "Syria's university campuses were the domain of both its established middle class and its aspiring lower middle class," Keith Watenpaugh, director of the UC Davis-HRI, told Foreign Policy by email. "They were one of the few social spaces in Syria, outside of the military, where Sunnis, Alawites and Christians mixed with any frequency."

The war has changed that. "UNICEF and other humanitarian organizations have made it very clear that the entire education sector in Syria is collapsing," Watenpaugh tells FP -- a fact also demonstrated by the new HRW report, "Safe No More: Students and Schools under Attack in Syria," about primary and secondary education. "As anti-regime higher education professionals and students have fled the country or stopped attending the universities, the remaining faculty are mostly regime loyalists. For decades Syria has been hemorrhaging its best and brightest -- tired of the party, but also the loss of opportunity. The war has accelerated that process."

As schools are closed by the violence and university students flee the country, those opportunities are slipping away. When Watenpaugh and his co-authors visited the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan in April, relief workers told him that there were no university students among the camp's 140,000 residents, "only poor and uneducated villagers," he wrote in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. That simply wasn't true. In their conversations with overlooked refugee students at the camp, they found them eager "to renew their studies, even if it meant leaving their families and traveling farther abroad," but they also found that their efforts to continue their education have been stifled by a lack of money, studying opportunities, and paperwork (like transcripts and standardized test results left behind).

Watenpaugh hopes that special arrangements can be made for visiting students in the region, especially in Egypt, Lebanon, and Turkey, where there are many universities and, in many cases, lower tuition costs than in Jordan. Otherwise, post-conflict Syria could face an even steeper class divide. "Often when we focus on the elite," he tells FP, "we end up enabling emigration and not empowering large numbers of mid-range students to go home and rebuild their societies." It's a bleak prospect that could leave students who thought they were rising in society "at the bottom end of the economic ladder -- either in Syria or on the margins of Jordanian, Lebanese, and Turkish society."

That disappointment will exacerbate the prospects for peace in the long-term, he writes by email: "That loss of status is a sure path to anomie and radicalization. Angry, resentful, and left-out, those students who fall off the edge, as it were, will be a burden on any peace and reconciliation process."

The fight for Syria seems as intractable as ever, but the struggle for what comes next is already well underway.

With the revelation that the Obama administration has continued a Bush-era program at the National Security Agency to directly access the servers of nine leading tech companies, civil liberties advocates have a sneaking suspicion that not much has changed at the White House since Obama took over. Rather than dismantling the national security apparatus he attacked as a candidate, he seems to have kept it largely in place.

But here's another trend Obama looks to have continued during his time in office: The use of horrifically bad PowerPoint slides.

In their bombshell reports on PRISM -- the NSA program at the center of the latest scandal -- the Guardian and the Washington Post both relied on a series of 41 slides intended for a group of senior NSA analysts. Judging by the slides published by the two papers, the folks over at the super-high tech spy agency aren't all too PowerPoint proficient. Switch out some of the text, and the slides wouldn't look all that out of place at a high school bake sale -- a bake sale with some high-powered corporate sponsors, anyway.

Courtesy of the Washington Post, have a look:

It may sound trivial, but the use of terrible, often-confusing PowerPoint slides is a serious problem for the U.S. military, and the slides describing PRISM -- while by no means the worst offenders -- continue a long, dismal history of the U.S. government proving less than adept at effectively communicating information.

To get some perspective on why the U.S. government should pay more attention to good design, FP called up John Maeda, the president of the Rhode Island School of Design and the author of The Laws of Simplicity.

"At  first glance, it seems that that the issue is something about aesthetics, but when you look deeper from a design perspective, you see that it's cut and pasted together from many sources and it reveals the social engineering behind the presentation," Maeda says of the NSA's PRISM presentation."What you get isn't even chicken soup but a chunky stew."

Good design is often confused with prettiness, but with a presentation like this one the far more important issue is effective communication, according to Maeda. In the NSA's slides, the jumble of corporate logos at the top of the presentation creates a great deal of confusion over who is accountable for this program, Maeda says.

So if you're a government worker reading this, here's some advice from Maeda on what makes for an effective, well-designed presentation: "It's more about clarity over style and accountability over indifference."

Confusing PowerPoint presentations have become something of a running joke inside the U.S. government, and the problem is particularly acute inside the U.S. military -- of which the NSA is a part. "PowerPoint makes us stupid," Gen. James N. Mattis declared at a military conference in 2010.

The ur-father of awful PowerPoint slides is a now-iconic flowchart of the interconnected causes behind the war in Afghanistan presented to commanders in 2009. That flowchart, which looks like something a college student might produce in the midst of an overnight Ritalin-binge, is below (and in all its hi-res glory here):

"When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war," Gen. Stanley McChrystal observed upon being shown the slide.

While the rest of us have to live in an information economy in which the presentation of information makes a real difference, the U.S. government has the privilege of living above all that.

But that doesn't mean it's better off for it.

Enjoy (let's just say it doesn't paint the most flattering picture of Obama, and it will make you even more scared of your phone):

Do investors think it's a smart move for companies to cooperate when the U.S. government asks for help collecting information on customers?

With the exception of Apple shares, which continued on the downward trajectory they've been on for the past few days, shares of most of the other companies -- the public ones, at least (sorry, no PalTalk) -- reportedly involved in National Security Agency's PRISM surveillance program were up in early trading on Friday.

At press time, shares of Google, which also owns YouTube, were up more than 9 points, or over 1 percent. Google experienced the biggest jump, but shares of Facebook, Yahoo!, Microsoft (which owns Skype), and AOL were all up slightly on Friday morning. Shares of Verizon -- which reportedly shared information with the NSA through another program -- were down slightly.

Of course, we don't know exactly what prompted investors to buy up PRISM-linked stocks this morning (the May jobs report may have pushed stocks higher, and the Dow and Nasdaq were each up roughly a percentage point at press time). The increases in share prices were by no means huge, so it's probably less that the PRISM news prompted a wave of investor enthusiasm and more that traders simply shrugged off the reports.

I'm no savvy tech investor, but my first thoughts on the business repercussions of PRISM were more along the lines of the question Slate's Matt Yglesias raised today: Are foreign countries going to be more wary of granting these companies access to their markets amid fears that they've effectively been turned into proxy spies for the U.S. government? (It's worth noting, by the way, that the companies are still vigorously denying that they're participating in the program.)

But maybe investors know something I don't. Massive subsidies in the pipeline to help fund Google Glass? 

Recep Tayyip Erdogan has declared war on Twitter. The Turkish premier has laid blame for the protests currently rocking his country at the feet of the popular microblogging site, referring to it as a "menace" and a "scourge" that has spread lies about events in his country. And the Turkish police have followed his lead: Authorities have arrested dozens of social media users for spreading "false information" about the demonstrations, while the police are reportedly scrutinizing 200,000 "fake" Twitter accounts.

A crackdown on media is nothing new in Erdogan's Turkey (or under previous Turkish governments, for that matter). Turkey is currently the world's leading jailer of journalists, beating out such strong competition as Iran and China. Perhaps even more pernicious is the media's financial dependence on political patrons: For example, the pro-government newspaper Sabah, which is owned by a holding company run by Erdogan's son-in-law, ran a front page praising the prime minister for his anti-smoking campaign on the first, tumultuous day of protests.

An enterprising group of young university students have stepped in to fill this information gap -- and disprove Erdogan's dark warnings about social media. Under the moniker 140journos (for the number of characters in a tweet), they have long undermined the state's tight grip on information -- reporting on everything from Kurdish activism to gay rights issues. Since the beginning of the protests, the team told FP that they have been working 20 hours a day, creating a streaming timeline of the most important events in the country.

"Credible or not, social media has been the only [news] source until now," 140journos told FP. "Interaction has been immense.... One of the good aspects of the protests is that the news delivered on social media has been legitimized for many people. A lot of people have created Twitter accounts to get notified right away."

The team acknowledged that social media had been far from perfect. Twitter users, trying to incite outrage at the Turkish government response, have spread rumors that authorities were using the infamous Vietnam War-era herbicide Agent Orange on protesters, and passed off videos of police brutality elsewhere as occurring in Turkey. 140journos sees its job as cutting through the disinformation, using a network of trusted volunteers on the ground to verify the information that comes their way.

The mainstream media's failure has helped fuel the growth of Turkish citizen journalism. The 140journos team castigated the media's "shameful silence" on the protests, saying that its corporate owners were skewing the coverage for political purposes. Twitter and Facebook have also proved more adept at capturing the spirit of the protests: "Social platforms carried the mutual sense of humor of the protesters," the team explained. "Humor has been a motivational reinforcement in spite of [protesters'] nervousness of the state and police."

In line with that spirit, 140journos' most popular tweet since the beginning of the protests doesn't show a massive protest or police brutality. Rather, the team said it was a viewpoint even less likely to appear in mainstream Turkish media: The image shows a television smashed on the street of the Istanbul neighborhood of Besiktas, which had been thrown by a Turkish man who shouted, "I'm sick of the lies of this!"

Read a transcript of the interview with the 140journos team after the break. It has been condensed and edited.

Read on

Reports by the Washington Post and the Guardian on PRISM, a top-secret National Security Agency program that directly mines digital data from the servers of major Internet companies, raises big questions about the proper balance between privacy and national security, the true nature of the terrorist threat facing the United States, the role leaks play in a free press, and the legality of government surveillance. But they also bring an admittedly more minor question to mind: What in the world is PalTalk?

Let me backtrack a bit. Thursday's reports include a slide from a PowerPoint presentation for senior NSA analysts that charts when the nine tech companies complying with the program signed up. A murderers' row of Silicon Valley giants appears -- with PalTalk sandwiched inexplicably in the middle.

The Washington Post and the Guardian don't go into detail about why PalTalk is on the list, but the Post does offer this clue:

PalTalk, although much smaller, has hosted significant traffic during the Arab Spring and in the ongoing Syrian civil war.

So what is PalTalk? Here's how the (mostly) free instant messaging service, which was founded by Jason Katz in 1998, describes itself on its website:

Paltalk is the world's largest video chat community, with more than 4 million active members. Paltalk provides video and chat capabilities that can facilitate virtual face-to-face interactions between individuals and between groups. It is the only provider that can support hundreds of thousands of users simultaneously, including thousands of people within a single chat room.

The Washington Post mentions that PalTalk has received substantial traffic during the Arab Spring and Syrian civil war, but people have also raised concerns for years now about terrorists using its chat rooms (in 2012, for instance, the British press reported that four men plotting to bomb the London Stock Exchange had made contact with each other through the service). In 2009, the year PalTalk reportedly began participating in the NSA's program, a U.N. report on the "Use of the Internet for Terrorist Purposes" expressed concern about al Qaeda propaganda spreading in "debate groups such as Yahoo and PalTalk."

That same year, PCWorld reported that terrorist networks were harnessing PalTalk for recruitment purposes:

Cyberterrorists are using a series of online forums and at least one social-networking site, PalTalk, to recruit people to their cause, Evan Kohlmann, a senior investigator and private consultant for Global Terror Alert, said at the International Conference on Cyber Security 2009 in New York. Many of these people never actually meet in person, but conspire online to launch both cyberterrorist and physical terrorist attacks such as suicide bombings, he said....

[P]eople have actually used PalTalk, a chat-room hosting site, to host a live question-and-answer with people they alleged to be Al-Qaeda leaders, Kohlmann said. He said that he's not sure if the company "actually realizes what is going on with their chat rooms," but that the chat room in question is well known among members of jihadi forums.

"In this case, we are particularly talking about a single chat room, with a slightly-changing-but-mostly-static identifiable name, accessible via the official PalTalk chat room index," he said via e-mail a day after his presentation in New York. "This chat room has been routinely advertised on jihadi Web forums, and it is used on a day-to-day basis to trade download links for Al Qaeda propaganda videos [and] terrorist instructional manuals ... If the company hasn't gotten a hint of any of this by now, then they really need to start re-considering their security policies."

At the time, PalTalk responded to the charge that jihadists were exploiting its chat rooms, highlighting its constraints in taking down forums:

When asked if the company is aware of Al-Qaeda chat rooms, Judy Shapiro, vice president of marketing for New York-based PalTalk, said the company is aware that there are many political-discussion forums. However, if the chat occurring within those rooms does not violate the company's terms of service for troublesome language, freedom of speech applies.

"We absolutely shouldn't discriminate," she said. "We can't constrain people's ability to say what they want. If someone says, I am the head of Al Qaeda, come talk to me, that's perfectly legal."

In its terms of service, PalTalk lists "unacceptable conduct" that would violate those terms as "threatening, harassing, or intimidating another user" or "transmitting any unlawful, threatening, abusive, profane, offensive, defamatory, or hateful text or voice communication or images or other material, or any racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable material, or any material that violates or infringes the intellectual property or privacy or publicity or other rights of any other party," among other kinds of behavior.

PalTalk will take down a chat room with no warning if users report trouble to its moderators. "If someone said, how do I create a bomb I can [detonate] in Times Square," that would obviously raise a red flag, Shapiro said.

In cases where "the level of language" would warrant an investigation, PalTalk would take whatever steps necessary to cooperate with law-enforcement officials or take down the site or both if there is good reason, she said.

(For what it's worth, PalTalk's terms of service don't appear to have changed much since the report.)

All of which is to say: the NSA appears to have had its reasons for reaching out to PalTalk.

Update: PalTalk has issued a statement to the Wall Street Journal denying knowledge of the PRISM program -- a stance several other tech firms referenced in the NSA slides have also taken. "We have not heard of PRISM," the company told the paper. "Paltalk exercises extreme care to protect and secure users' data, only responding to court orders as required to by law. Paltalk does not provide any government agency with direct access to its servers."