Following a two-day storm of media headlines and company denials, he-saids and he-saids, the director of national intelligence has entered the fray to release a statement setting the record straight on the nature of its PRISM program, sort of.

"PRISM is not an undisclosed collection or data mining program," U.S. Director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper, wrote in the three-page statement (.PDF) released late today.

"It is an internal government computer system used to facilitate the government's statutorily authorized collection of foreign intelligence information from electronic communication service providers under court supervision," he wrote.

The statement brought hours of Twitter speculation to an end, but still left unanswered many pressing questions about how the government uses FISA to conduct surveillance and obtain records and why the secret FISA Court found in 2011 that the government was in violation of the spirit of FISA in conducting its collection activities.

Directly addressing the inaccuracies in articles published by the Guardian and Washington Post, which asserted that PRISM was a bulk-collection program that allowed the National Security Agency to tap directly into the servers of nine internet companies, including Google, Facebook, and Yahoo, Clapper wrote that in a rush to publish "there are significant misimpressions that have resulted from the recent articles."

"Not all the inaccuracies can be corrected without further revealing classified information," he said. "I have, however, declassified for release the attached details about the recent unauthorized disclosures in hope that it will help dispel some of the myths and add necessary context to what has been published."

The CEOs of Google and Facebook denied that the government had a backdoor into their systems or that they provided the government with bulk data. Other companies listed by the Guardian and Washington Post as being part of the program denied participating in it as well. The newspapers based their reporting on a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation obtained via an anonymous source, which apparently made assertions that the two media outlets misinterpreted to mean the NSA had direct access to private company servers.

The details are sparse in Clapper's FAQ and don't really shed much more light on the PRISM system, focusing more on justifying the government's data collection activities than explaining how much data gets collected by the system.

But he does say that PRISM is essentially a government software tool for facilitating the collection of targeted acquisition of information concerning foreign targets located outside the United States, as authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Though he doesn't elaborate on the nature of the tool, privacy experts like independent technologist Ashkan Soltani have speculated, based on published descriptions of the system, that it is likely some kind of API to automate the process of submitting court orders to the internet companies and receiving their responses and data.

Image: Courtesy of the Washington Post

It's "basically a data-ingestion API," he told Mashable for submitting FISA data requests and getting responses in a machine-readable form.

Left unsaid in the government's FAQ is exactly how targeted the FISA requests are and how much data it obtains each year from using them. Companies like Google and Facebook are prohibited from disclosing even generic statistics on the numbers of FISA requests they get each year, or the number of Gmail account holders and Google search users, to name just two of Google's services, that are affected by the requests.

All that's known about FISA requests are disclosed in an annual report by the Justice Department to Congress, which gives only a bare-bone stat. In 2012, we know from that report, the government made 1,856 applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain records. None of those requests for electronic surveillance were denied by the court. That figure was about 5 percent higher than the 1,745 applications in 2011.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been fighting to obtain a secret FISA court opinion that found the National Security Agency's surveillance under the FISA Amendments Act to be unconstitutional.

Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Mark Udall (D-Colorado) revealed the existence of the opinion,but have been unable to discuss it publicly. The FISA Court reportedly found that the government's collection activities under FISA Section 702 "circumvented the spirit of the law” and violated the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures.