NSA taps into Google, Yahoo data clouds, can collect data 'at will,' says Post

National Security Agency has secretly tapped private fiber-optic networks that connect Google's and Yahoo's worldwide data centers, giving it access to stored user data, Washington Post reports.

(Credit: The Washington Post)

The NSA has secretly tapped into the private fiber-optic networks that connect Google's and Yahoo's worldwide data centers, allowing the spy agency to suck up 'at will' metadata and content belonging to users of the companies' services, according to The Washington Post.

Under a program called MUSCULAR -- a joint project with British NSA counterpart the GCHQ -- the NSA takes advantage of overseas taps to intercept data flowing within Google's and Yahoo's geographically distributed data 'clouds,' where multiple copies of user data are stored unencrypted, the Post reports, citing documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, as well as unnamed 'knowledgeable officials.'

Such data might include, for example, information in Gmail accounts or Google Drive documents.

The hundreds of millions of user accounts that are thus accessible to the NSA include many belonging to Americans, but the offshore taps allow the agency to presume the users are foreign and to sidestep the restrictions placed on domestic surveillance by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the Post reports.

In a statement to the Post, Google said it was 'troubled by allegations of the government intercepting traffic between our data centers, and we are not aware of this activity.'

'We have long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping,' Google said, 'which is why we continue to extend encryption across more and more Google services and links.'

Yahoo told the Post: 'We have strict controls in place to protect the security of our data centers, and we have not given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency.'

And the paper said, 'White House officials and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA, declined to confirm, deny or explain why the agency infiltrates Google and Yahoo networks overseas.'

Blog Politico reports that NSA Director Keith Alexander was asked about the Post report while speaking at a cybersecurity summit. Queried on whether the NSA tapped the data centers, Alexander replied, 'Not to my knowledge,' Politico said.