According to the documents leaked by Edward Snowden, that espionage was sniffed in-transit in plaintext across the Internet's trunk and filtered against XKEYSCORE queries for eventual collection. Google's surprise came from the expectation that cross-datacenter traffic was sent over direct circuits and not susceptible to interception.
It was totally unrelated to PRISM, which was more like a voluntary law enforcement access portal that autoapproved every request. The participating companies since made public statements saying they no longer operate the portal, thereby forcing intelligence agencies to use National Security Letters instead. That's certainly closer to the intent of the laws passed by Congress.
It was totally unrelated to PRISM, which was more like a voluntary law enforcement access portal that autoapproved every request. The participating companies since made public statements saying they no longer operate the portal, thereby forcing intelligence agencies to use National Security Letters instead. That's certainly closer to the intent of the laws passed by Congress.