Well, this report to EFF happened in Jan 2006, and the Snowden/Prism leak happened in 2013, so at the time, it was in fact not "old news". I don't think Prism was even in operation until 2007.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_disclosures

Thank you for the links!

It’s good to understand the new. Also of course good to understand where we came from, imagine a number of users are hearing about PRISM for the first time with this post.