First journalists revealthat Mr. Snowden revealed nothing new. After all, we all knew that the NSA was monitoring everything.

http://www.businessinsider.com/60-minutes-reported-nsa-spying-in-2000-2013-6

Business Insider basically described Mr. Snowden as a dim-witted high-school dropout that caused himself a lot of pain over nada

And then we have this article that provides more insight into what PRISM does.

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-prism-surveillance-works-2013-6

Essentially what PRISM does is give a narrow view into a small set of users that the NSA has legally obtained wiretaps that allows them to look at their online activity in real-time.

That is both easy and simple to do and does not need mythical amounts of infrastructure to do…

My original assessment still holds:the technological illiteracy of the average reporter, the rabid anti-government bias of too many folks in SillyValley allowed a low-level functionary to convince them that alien technology had suddenly materialized in the bowels of the US government.