From over a year ago, an article by WIRED I had a started to draft a blog post about, is now extremely relevant:
For the first time, a former NSA official has gone on the record to describe the program, codenamed Stellar Wind, in detail. William Binney was a senior NSA crypto-mathematician largely responsible for automating the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network. A tall man with strands of black hair across the front of his scalp and dark, determined eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses, the 68-year-old spent nearly four decades breaking codes and finding new ways to channel billions of private phone calls and email messages from around the world into the NSA’s bulging databases. As chief and one of the two cofounders of the agency’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center, Binney and his team designed much of the infrastructure that’s still likely used to intercept international and foreign communications.
My guess: Google, Apple, etc. are not knowingly handing data over, just “named” as sources the NSA is obviously interested in harvesting. As the Wired article describes, the NSA is intercepting data (at the lowest levels possible) and currently or planning to decrypt, decypher, and extract as much as they can…