Four new slides detailing more of the top-secret NSA program known as PRISM were released Saturday by The Washington Post.
The slides — given to the Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden — show more detail of the flow of information from private companies to the NSA, how the information was analyzed, and how many people were targeted by the PRISM program.
The new slides appear to contradict earlier reports of "direct access" into private companies servers and claims of the NSA operating outside of the law.
The first slide shows the targeting process of an NSA analyst, with supervisor and FBI oversight to ensure that American citizens are not being targeted.
On the second slide, a flow chart is shown, with private companies — such as Yahoo or Google — first providing data to the FBI, then on to the NSA for processing upon request.
Perhaps the most interesting slide is the fourth, which says there were 117,675 active surveillance targets in the Prism database, as of April 5.
The Prism program, first revealed on June 6, reportedly allows the NSA to gain access to a number of major internet companies, including Google, Facebook, and Skype.
All the companies named have strongly denied any involvement and James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, has stressed that the program is lawful.
The original four slides were first published on June 6. Snowden gave The Guardian and The Washington Post a presentation that included 41 slides, which has not yet been revealed in full.