With the revelation that the Obama administration has continued a Bush-era program at the National Security Agency to directly access the servers of nine leading tech companies, civil liberties advocates have a sneaking suspicion that not much has changed at the White House since Obama took over. Rather than dismantling the national security apparatus he attacked as a candidate, he seems to have kept it largely in place.

But here's another trend Obama looks to have continued during his time in office: The use of horrifically bad PowerPoint slides.

In their bombshell reports on PRISM -- the NSA program at the center of the latest scandal -- the Guardian and the Washington Post both relied on a series of 41 slides intended for a group of senior NSA analysts. Judging by the slides published by the two papers, the folks over at the super-high tech spy agency aren't all too PowerPoint proficient. Switch out some of the text, and the slides wouldn't look all that out of place at a high school bake sale -- a bake sale with some high-powered corporate sponsors, anyway.

Courtesy of the Washington Post, have a look:

It may sound trivial, but the use of terrible, often-confusing PowerPoint slides is a serious problem for the U.S. military, and the slides describing PRISM -- while by no means the worst offenders -- continue a long, dismal history of the U.S. government proving less than adept at effectively communicating information.

To get some perspective on why the U.S. government should pay more attention to good design, FP called up John Maeda, the president of the Rhode Island School of Design and the author of The Laws of Simplicity.

"At  first glance, it seems that that the issue is something about aesthetics, but when you look deeper from a design perspective, you see that it's cut and pasted together from many sources and it reveals the social engineering behind the presentation," Maeda says of the NSA's PRISM presentation."What you get isn't even chicken soup but a chunky stew."

Good design is often confused with prettiness, but with a presentation like this one the far more important issue is effective communication, according to Maeda. In the NSA's slides, the jumble of corporate logos at the top of the presentation creates a great deal of confusion over who is accountable for this program, Maeda says.

So if you're a government worker reading this, here's some advice from Maeda on what makes for an effective, well-designed presentation: "It's more about clarity over style and accountability over indifference."

Confusing PowerPoint presentations have become something of a running joke inside the U.S. government, and the problem is particularly acute inside the U.S. military -- of which the NSA is a part. "PowerPoint makes us stupid," Gen. James N. Mattis declared at a military conference in 2010.

The ur-father of awful PowerPoint slides is a now-iconic flowchart of the interconnected causes behind the war in Afghanistan presented to commanders in 2009. That flowchart, which looks like something a college student might produce in the midst of an overnight Ritalin-binge, is below (and in all its hi-res glory here):

"When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war," Gen. Stanley McChrystal observed upon being shown the slide.

While the rest of us have to live in an information economy in which the presentation of information makes a real difference, the U.S. government has the privilege of living above all that.

But that doesn't mean it's better off for it.

Enjoy (let's just say it doesn't paint the most flattering picture of Obama, and it will make you even more scared of your phone):

Do investors think it's a smart move for companies to cooperate when the U.S. government asks for help collecting information on customers?

With the exception of Apple shares, which continued on the downward trajectory they've been on for the past few days, shares of most of the other companies -- the public ones, at least (sorry, no PalTalk) -- reportedly involved in National Security Agency's PRISM surveillance program were up in early trading on Friday.

At press time, shares of Google, which also owns YouTube, were up more than 9 points, or over 1 percent. Google experienced the biggest jump, but shares of Facebook, Yahoo!, Microsoft (which owns Skype), and AOL were all up slightly on Friday morning. Shares of Verizon -- which reportedly shared information with the NSA through another program -- were down slightly.

Of course, we don't know exactly what prompted investors to buy up PRISM-linked stocks this morning (the May jobs report may have pushed stocks higher, and the Dow and Nasdaq were each up roughly a percentage point at press time). The increases in share prices were by no means huge, so it's probably less that the PRISM news prompted a wave of investor enthusiasm and more that traders simply shrugged off the reports.

I'm no savvy tech investor, but my first thoughts on the business repercussions of PRISM were more along the lines of the question Slate's Matt Yglesias raised today: Are foreign countries going to be more wary of granting these companies access to their markets amid fears that they've effectively been turned into proxy spies for the U.S. government? (It's worth noting, by the way, that the companies are still vigorously denying that they're participating in the program.)

But maybe investors know something I don't. Massive subsidies in the pipeline to help fund Google Glass? 

Recep Tayyip Erdogan has declared war on Twitter. The Turkish premier has laid blame for the protests currently rocking his country at the feet of the popular microblogging site, referring to it as a "menace" and a "scourge" that has spread lies about events in his country. And the Turkish police have followed his lead: Authorities have arrested dozens of social media users for spreading "false information" about the demonstrations, while the police are reportedly scrutinizing 200,000 "fake" Twitter accounts.

A crackdown on media is nothing new in Erdogan's Turkey (or under previous Turkish governments, for that matter). Turkey is currently the world's leading jailer of journalists, beating out such strong competition as Iran and China. Perhaps even more pernicious is the media's financial dependence on political patrons: For example, the pro-government newspaper Sabah, which is owned by a holding company run by Erdogan's son-in-law, ran a front page praising the prime minister for his anti-smoking campaign on the first, tumultuous day of protests.

An enterprising group of young university students have stepped in to fill this information gap -- and disprove Erdogan's dark warnings about social media. Under the moniker 140journos (for the number of characters in a tweet), they have long undermined the state's tight grip on information -- reporting on everything from Kurdish activism to gay rights issues. Since the beginning of the protests, the team told FP that they have been working 20 hours a day, creating a streaming timeline of the most important events in the country.

"Credible or not, social media has been the only [news] source until now," 140journos told FP. "Interaction has been immense.... One of the good aspects of the protests is that the news delivered on social media has been legitimized for many people. A lot of people have created Twitter accounts to get notified right away."

The team acknowledged that social media had been far from perfect. Twitter users, trying to incite outrage at the Turkish government response, have spread rumors that authorities were using the infamous Vietnam War-era herbicide Agent Orange on protesters, and passed off videos of police brutality elsewhere as occurring in Turkey. 140journos sees its job as cutting through the disinformation, using a network of trusted volunteers on the ground to verify the information that comes their way.

The mainstream media's failure has helped fuel the growth of Turkish citizen journalism. The 140journos team castigated the media's "shameful silence" on the protests, saying that its corporate owners were skewing the coverage for political purposes. Twitter and Facebook have also proved more adept at capturing the spirit of the protests: "Social platforms carried the mutual sense of humor of the protesters," the team explained. "Humor has been a motivational reinforcement in spite of [protesters'] nervousness of the state and police."

In line with that spirit, 140journos' most popular tweet since the beginning of the protests doesn't show a massive protest or police brutality. Rather, the team said it was a viewpoint even less likely to appear in mainstream Turkish media: The image shows a television smashed on the street of the Istanbul neighborhood of Besiktas, which had been thrown by a Turkish man who shouted, "I'm sick of the lies of this!"

Read a transcript of the interview with the 140journos team after the break. It has been condensed and edited.

Read on

Reports by the Washington Post and the Guardian on PRISM, a top-secret National Security Agency program that directly mines digital data from the servers of major Internet companies, raises big questions about the proper balance between privacy and national security, the true nature of the terrorist threat facing the United States, the role leaks play in a free press, and the legality of government surveillance. But they also bring an admittedly more minor question to mind: What in the world is PalTalk?

Let me backtrack a bit. Thursday's reports include a slide from a PowerPoint presentation for senior NSA analysts that charts when the nine tech companies complying with the program signed up. A murderers' row of Silicon Valley giants appears -- with PalTalk sandwiched inexplicably in the middle.

The Washington Post and the Guardian don't go into detail about why PalTalk is on the list, but the Post does offer this clue:

PalTalk, although much smaller, has hosted significant traffic during the Arab Spring and in the ongoing Syrian civil war.

So what is PalTalk? Here's how the (mostly) free instant messaging service, which was founded by Jason Katz in 1998, describes itself on its website:

Paltalk is the world's largest video chat community, with more than 4 million active members. Paltalk provides video and chat capabilities that can facilitate virtual face-to-face interactions between individuals and between groups. It is the only provider that can support hundreds of thousands of users simultaneously, including thousands of people within a single chat room.

The Washington Post mentions that PalTalk has received substantial traffic during the Arab Spring and Syrian civil war, but people have also raised concerns for years now about terrorists using its chat rooms (in 2012, for instance, the British press reported that four men plotting to bomb the London Stock Exchange had made contact with each other through the service). In 2009, the year PalTalk reportedly began participating in the NSA's program, a U.N. report on the "Use of the Internet for Terrorist Purposes" expressed concern about al Qaeda propaganda spreading in "debate groups such as Yahoo and PalTalk."

That same year, PCWorld reported that terrorist networks were harnessing PalTalk for recruitment purposes:

Cyberterrorists are using a series of online forums and at least one social-networking site, PalTalk, to recruit people to their cause, Evan Kohlmann, a senior investigator and private consultant for Global Terror Alert, said at the International Conference on Cyber Security 2009 in New York. Many of these people never actually meet in person, but conspire online to launch both cyberterrorist and physical terrorist attacks such as suicide bombings, he said....

[P]eople have actually used PalTalk, a chat-room hosting site, to host a live question-and-answer with people they alleged to be Al-Qaeda leaders, Kohlmann said. He said that he's not sure if the company "actually realizes what is going on with their chat rooms," but that the chat room in question is well known among members of jihadi forums.

"In this case, we are particularly talking about a single chat room, with a slightly-changing-but-mostly-static identifiable name, accessible via the official PalTalk chat room index," he said via e-mail a day after his presentation in New York. "This chat room has been routinely advertised on jihadi Web forums, and it is used on a day-to-day basis to trade download links for Al Qaeda propaganda videos [and] terrorist instructional manuals ... If the company hasn't gotten a hint of any of this by now, then they really need to start re-considering their security policies."

At the time, PalTalk responded to the charge that jihadists were exploiting its chat rooms, highlighting its constraints in taking down forums:

When asked if the company is aware of Al-Qaeda chat rooms, Judy Shapiro, vice president of marketing for New York-based PalTalk, said the company is aware that there are many political-discussion forums. However, if the chat occurring within those rooms does not violate the company's terms of service for troublesome language, freedom of speech applies.

"We absolutely shouldn't discriminate," she said. "We can't constrain people's ability to say what they want. If someone says, I am the head of Al Qaeda, come talk to me, that's perfectly legal."

In its terms of service, PalTalk lists "unacceptable conduct" that would violate those terms as "threatening, harassing, or intimidating another user" or "transmitting any unlawful, threatening, abusive, profane, offensive, defamatory, or hateful text or voice communication or images or other material, or any racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable material, or any material that violates or infringes the intellectual property or privacy or publicity or other rights of any other party," among other kinds of behavior.

PalTalk will take down a chat room with no warning if users report trouble to its moderators. "If someone said, how do I create a bomb I can [detonate] in Times Square," that would obviously raise a red flag, Shapiro said.

In cases where "the level of language" would warrant an investigation, PalTalk would take whatever steps necessary to cooperate with law-enforcement officials or take down the site or both if there is good reason, she said.

(For what it's worth, PalTalk's terms of service don't appear to have changed much since the report.)

All of which is to say: the NSA appears to have had its reasons for reaching out to PalTalk.

Update: PalTalk has issued a statement to the Wall Street Journal denying knowledge of the PRISM program -- a stance several other tech firms referenced in the NSA slides have also taken. "We have not heard of PRISM," the company told the paper. "Paltalk exercises extreme care to protect and secure users' data, only responding to court orders as required to by law. Paltalk does not provide any government agency with direct access to its servers."

In a bombshell scoop, the Washington Post is reporting that the National Security Agency (NSA) has gained direct access to the servers of nine prominent Internet companies, enabling the spy agency to track e-mails, photographs, and video, among other forms of digital communciation.

The highly classified program, known as PRISM, has emerged as a central tool in the NSA's arsenal and, according to documents detailing the program's operation, is run with the assistance of the Silicon Valley tech companies it targets. The exposure of the program -- which was also reported by the Guardian -- is the latest in a string of reports detailing government snooping that have reignited the debate in Washington over the proper balance between privacy and national security.

To put that debate in perspective, here's how PRISM stacks up by the numbers based on what we've learned today:

1,477: The number of times data obtained via PRISM has been cited in the president's daily intelligence briefing.

1 in 7: The proportion of NSA intelligence reports using raw material from PRISM.

77,000: The number of intelligence reports that have cited PRISM.

2,000: The number of PRISM-based reports issued per month.

24,005: The number of PRISM-based reports issued in 2012 alone, which was a 27 percent increase from the previous year.

9: The number of tech companies whose servers NSA has access to via PRISM.

6: The number of years PRISM has been in operation.

2: The number of presidential administrations PRISM has operated under.

51 percent: The minimum confidence of a target's "foreignness" when an NSA analyst uses PRISM.

248 percent: The increase in 2012 in the number of Skype communications intercepted via PRISM

131 percent: The increase in 2012 in PRISM requests for Facebook data.

63 percent: The increase in 2012 in PRISM requests for Google data.

$20 million: The annual cost of PRISM.

$8 billion: The estimated annual budget of the NSA.

35,000 to 55,000: The estimated number of employees at the NSA.

0: The number of times Twitter has agreed to participate in PRISM.

1: The number of ad campaigns by Microsoft, the first company to agree to participate in PRISM, in which the company declares "your privacy is our priority."

Here's that ad:

Username: NastoyashiVVP

60/M/Straight/Moscow

DETAILS:

Height: 5'8 (Fine, 5'5)

Body type: Athletic

Diet: Healthy, tested for poison

Smokes: Nyet

Drinks: Socially, with friends and assorted flunkies

Drugs: Definitely not

Religion: Russian Orthodox

Sign: Libra

Job: President of Russia

Income: Rather not say

Children: 2 daughters. No, you cannot meet them.

Pets: "Bigger, stronger, faster" than yours

Speaks: Russian, German, some English

ABOUT ME:

My self-summary: The world's only true democrat, treasure hunter, animal lover.

What I'm doing with my life: Restoring Russia to its rightful position of global leadership

I'm really good at: Sovereign democracy, political technology, winning elections by staggering margins, suppressing hooliganism, judo, hockey, cruising on my big trike, tickling the ivories, shooting whales (but only for a good cause)

The first things people usually notice about me: Raw charisma, piercing blue eyes that reveal my soul, pecs, the fact that I'm the president

Favorite books, movies, shows, and music: Ernest Hemingway, anything with Steven Seagal or Gérard Depardieu, Larry King Live, the Beatles (not ABBA!). Also not a big fan of punk.

The six things I could never do without: Being the leader of Russia, my siloviki posse, my photo team, outdoor sporting equipment, my watch collection, the mansion I am definitely not building on the Black Sea

The most private thing I'm willing to admit: My prime minister gets on my nerves sometimes

You should message me if: You want to see the other side of those Kremlin walls