Revelations from Edward Snowden’s documents continued, as the latest documents stated that the US National Security Agency (NSA) has secretly broken into the main communication links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers across the globe.
By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans, the documents say.
According to a top-secret accounting, the NSA’s acquisitions directorate sends millions of records every day from internal Yahoo and Google networks to data warehouses at the agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade. In the preceding 30 days, the report said, field collectors had processed and sent back 181,280,466 new records, including “metadata,” which would indicate who sent or received e-mails, text, audio and video files.
The infiltration is especially striking because the NSA, under a separate program known as PRISM, has front-door access to Google and Yahoo user accounts through a court-approved process.
The MUSCULAR project appears to be an unusually aggressive use of NSA tradecraft against flagship American companies. The agency is built for high-tech spying, with a wide range of digital tools, but it has not been known to use them routinely against US companies.
In a statement, Google’s chief legal officer David Drummond said that the company is outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks, and it underscores the need for urgent reform.
A Yahoo spokeswoman said, the company has strict controls in place to protect the security of data centers and we have not given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency.