New reports released Saturday morning reveal Facebook and Google were telling something resembling the truth when they denied the NSA has "direct access" to their servers, and that the government doesn't, in fact, have direct access to these massive personal information treasures storing most of our modern day-to-day communications. Both The New York Times' Claire Cain Miller and CNET's Declan McCullagh have reports debunking some the previous myths about the way PRISM and the NSA interact with the tech companies who cooperate with their surveillance work. "It's not as described in the histrionics in the Washington Post or the Guardian," a source told McCullagh, who went on to say it's "a very formalized legal process that companies are obliged to do."

First, it turns out Facebook and Google weren't lying. The government does not have "direct access" to their servers. But they are negotiating something special for the NSA to make obtaining the specially requested information as easy as a ransom hand-off. Per Miller:

In at least two cases, at Google and Facebook, one of the plans discussed was to build separate, secure portals, like a digital version of the secure physical rooms that have long existed for classified information, in some instances on company servers. Through these online rooms, the government would request data, companies would deposit it and the government would retrieve it, people briefed on the discussions said.

So the government doesn't have "direct access" to Facebook and Google servers, but there is a process in place so the NSA can request the information, and there's a special, secure place for them to retrieve that information. The NSA wants information on person X so they send a request to Google or Facebook. The tech company gathers all the information it has on person X and deposits that information onto the secure server set up for the NSA. Once the information is in place, the NSA accesses the secure server and retrieves the requested information. So the government doesn't have "direct access," or even "backdoor access," as has been implied.

The servers are, in effect, the tech equivalent of a safety deposit box that only the NSA and the corresponding tech company can access. Miller calls it "a locked mailbox," that the government has a key to open. Or we much prefer this visual, if you want to be brutish about it: a locked briefcase full of intel left in a digital garbage can with the NSA swinging in to pick it up at a prescribed time. Just like in the movies.

How other tech companies linked to PRISM ended up cooperating is unclear at this time. Twitter is only one who bristled at the government's request to make the handing-over of information easier. How Microsoft, Yahoo, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple all operate with the NSA is still unknown. In some instances NSA agents would be stationed at a tech companies' office and would remain "at the site for several weeks to download data to an agency laptop," Miller writes. Occasionally the government would request data in real time, "which companies send digitally," she reports. But this brings us to an important legal point.