those five companies i mentioned, plus microsoft, pal talk, aol, skype, apple and soon, according to the "post" dropbox. the post and guardian reporting that prism use the data feed as raw material for a massive data mining operation aimed at spotting patterns that might provide early warning of a terrorist attack. as we said, it comes hard on the heels of the revelation the guardian newspaper and elsewhere that must be giving any one of the tens of millions of americans who use a verizon cell phone a chill. word that the fbi and nsa asked for and got a secret court order giving them access to phone records for all verizon cell phone calls, foreign, domestic and local. not the conversations themselves, just everything else that's identifiable. white house officials neither confirming nor denying the story but they are defending the practice of data collection for national security purposes. again, both these programs have their roots in the prior administrations but have grown