The slides may have come from within NSA, but they were created for a non-technical audience of analysts. Suppose for the sake of argument that the reality is that the NSA has hardware adjacent to company servers or on the internet backbone nearby that can collect messages in transit that match some search query. That's not really direct access, and it's not indiscriminate -- all the subsequent statements from company execs and government sources would be correct. But it's easy to see how some mid-level worker in the NSA, trying to convey to analysts that PRISM enables them to retrieve emails, phone records etc. from various companies, would make an over-simplification and suggest that there is direct access to company servers.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." --Robert Hanlon. Despite the duplicitous and overly narrow statements about PRISM that skirt the truth, there's no reason to suggest they are all overtly lying, when a much simpler explanation is that some NSA employee overstated their technical capabilities on an internal powerpoint.
Read the articles by Post and Guardian. They published enough leaks to make clear how it works: the special court gives a blanket order, valid for as much as one year, but at least three months, under which the inteligence comunity can operate from their servers at the company site for up to one year without the company even knowing (or wanting to know) what is being requested from their servers. The court order is what's making the operation "legal" so the companies can't be held legally responsible. But that can't mean that the system doesn't exist.
> Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received—an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users’ call records. We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely false.
It would also be hard to square Microsoft's statement that
> In addition we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers.
"As the law stands now, the authorities may obtain cloud e-mail without a warrant if it is older than 180 days, thanks to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act adopted in 1986."
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." --Robert Hanlon. Despite the duplicitous and overly narrow statements about PRISM that skirt the truth, there's no reason to suggest they are all overtly lying, when a much simpler explanation is that some NSA employee overstated their technical capabilities on an internal powerpoint.