There have been several leaks from Snowdon, they are not limited to a single slide deck. I find it curious just how vitriolic you are on this single issue (direct access). We simply don't know the full story on PRISM or the other associated programs, we don't know how much of what the Google statement was true in a broad sense, and how much was simply legally true in a narrow sense. I would be very interested to know the real process (as would everyone here), as it could vary from highly automated with legal assistants clicking 'send all data' 100 times a day at the Google end without having sufficient information to actually check requests, to highly manual, with teams of lawyers assessing every request carefully with full information (though given the cavalier treatment of Congress by the NSA, I highly doubt this). However, I don't think it matters too much at present - what matters far more is the extensive and intrusive surveillance that the NSA feels it can pursue without informed congressional oversight rather than the details of one specific program.

What we do know is:

Snowdon leaked slides showing a Boundless informant program to catalogue data - almost 3 billion records collected over the month of March 2013 just from US sources - that's a huge amount of data for an agency that doesn't have a remit to surveill Americans.

Every phone call in the US is now being recorded by the NSA - that is almost the biggest story here, since we don't know if they also tap email headers, which would probably be worse.

Oversight of the NSA and other agencies is impotent, and most of congress simply wasn't aware of even the broad scope of the surveillance, let alone details.

DNI Clapper lied to congress with impunity over surveillance of Americans, the NSA lied over not having counts of records.

The NSA's standards are incredibly lax (allowing this leak to happen - he shouldn't have reached the front door with this data), and their interpretation of their remit worryingly broad (extending to collecting at least phone (and probably more) metadata on every single American and company). If the IT tech Snowdon had access to all this data, other countries probably have it already by other means.

Snowdon leaked slides on PRISM claiming 'collection directly from the servers' - this was presented by Greenwald and the Guardian as a claim to be verified and contrasted with Google's denial of direct access (I feel both are probably true - the slide in a broad sense, and Google in a narrow sense). The quotemarks in Guardian articles are there to attribute, not to undermine the content quoted.

Snowdon claims to have had access to anyone's email at providers like Google without obstruction at his relatively high clearance level (unverified) - I think he wanted to point out the lack of supervision of the process (hence ref. to president's personal email), and the lack of interaction with Google staff - the truth of this claim has yet to be tested and various important points (how quickly, what supervision, what sort of data etc) are elided. I'd like to hear more from Snowdon and Greenwald (or the US gov) on this.

If you are truly interested in all the issues raised by these leaks, you should address those very real and serious topics, not minor quibbles over whether a journalist's interpretation of the technical details of a transfer of records is correct. I can see why people might have jumped to conclusions over 'direct access', and do feel it's important to get to the bottom of the real process (I'm sure Google would love to tell if only to put the wilder theories to bed), but the reality without that is bad enough - given the many other programs we know about, and the admitted details of PRISM/FISA requests. I was a bit dishearted by the initial Google response but am pleased they are now pressuring the government to release figures for FISA requests, so that people can see the extent of the program as it impacts Google, but this issue is about more than Google and Facebook and records they might return on the basis of FISA requests. That would help define the scope of one of the many programs.

That reality of broad surveillance without adequate supervision is enough to put people off doing business in the US or hosting data there, and the acknowledged facts are enough to make it very easy for an unscrupulous president like Nixon to turn the US into a surveillance state and capture all the levers of power very quickly - something that should worry all American citizens. That is what Snowdon was warning against (see the last part of his video), and that is the most insidious part of this sort of widespread surveillance unchecked by public law and public courts - not how it is used today, but what it might enable if it is allowed to continue.