A U.S. federal judge has confirmed that the NSA’s infamous PRISM program does exist – allowing the agency to collect user data directly from major technology companies such as Yahoo, Google, Apple and Microsoft without the users’ knowledge and without a court order. The stunning admission by the judge means that the PRISM program, originally leaked by Edward Snowden, has given the American government the ability to physically access the servers of numerous internet companies since 2007 in order to snoop on U.S. citizens. Vocativ.com reports: Since the program’s disclosure, most government reports and redacted FISA court orders have referred to PRISM by the legal authority the NSA claims authorizes it, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But that’s confusing, because 702 also authorizes what’s called Upstream collection, which gives the NSA access to raw Internet data—not the same thing as PRISM, which is more specifically targeted. Federal District Court Judge John Gleeson, who brought up PRISM in a ruling dated February 18 and released Tuesday, is likely the first federal judge to do so, according to observers. In his ruling, he described the program this way: In PRISM collection, the government identifies the user accounts it wants to monitor and sends a [...]