NSA, UK hacked Yahoo! and Google data center interconnects

NSA, UK hacked Yahoo! and Google data center interconnects: “We have long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping, which is why we have continued to extend encryption across more and more Google services and links, especially the links in the slide,” Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, told the paper in a statement.

“We do not provide any government, including the US government, with access to our systems. We are 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.”

Under the scheme, GCHQ intercepts the traffic and stores it in a “buffer” that can hold between three and five days’ worth of traffic from the data centers. The NSA then picks through this to find useful information using up to 100,000 search terms before emptying the buffer.

What makes MUSCULAR so puzzling is that under the terms of the PRISM program, US intelligence services already have access to the records of both Google and Yahoo! Either Snowden’s documents are incorrect or the NSA and GCHQ have decided to cut out the middle man and go for the data directly.