Today the Guardian released another section of the video interview with Edward Snowden, conducted by Glenn Greenwald and activist Laura Poitras. In this episode of Life With Edward, he doesn’t just double down on the claim that NSA has “direct access” to all the information of every top technology company, he goes into great detail:

We’ve got PRISM, which is a demonstration how the U.S. government co-ops U.S. corporate power to its own ends. Companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft — they all get together with the NSA and provide the NSA with direct access to the backends to all of the systems you use to communicate, to store your data, to put things in the cloud, and even just to send birthday wishes and keep a record of your life.

And they give the NSA direct access so that they don’t need to oversee so they can’t be held liable for it. I think that’s a dangerous capability for anybody to have, but particularly an organization that’s demonstrated time and time against that they’ll work to shield themselves from oversight.

All of the companies named in those Powerpoint slides (Google, Facebook, Skype, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, etc.) have denied this allegation from the start.

I remain highly skeptical that all these major corporations would lie in unison, when their very existence depends on the trust of the people who use their products and services. If Snowden’s claims turned out to be true, and were verified, they’d be risking a massive consumer backlash the likes of which the world has never seen. All of them. In unison.

I’m not saying it’s totally impossible, but this is why the concept of Occam’s Razor exists, and this is my skeptical face. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and Edward Snowden has already demonstrated — graphically — that he will lie to promote his own claims.