The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials.<\/p>\nBy tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot.<\/p>\n
According to a top-secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, the NSA\u2019s acquisitions directorate sends millions of records every day from Yahoo and Google internal networks to data warehouses at the agency\u2019s headquarters at Fort Meade, Md. In the preceding 30 days, the report said, field collectors had processed and sent back 181,280,466 new records \u2014 including \u201cmetadata,\u201d which would indicate who sent or received e-mails and when, as well as content such as text, audio and video.<\/p>\n
The NSA\u2019s principal tool to exploit the data links is a project called MUSCULAR, operated jointly with the agency\u2019s British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters . From undisclosed interception points, the NSA and the GCHQ are copying entire data flows across fiber-optic cables that carry information between the data centers of the Silicon Valley giants.<\/strong><\/p>\nThe 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.<\/p>\n
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 U.S. companies.<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
In an NSA presentation slide on \u201cGoogle Cloud Exploitation,\u201d however, a sketch shows where the \u201cPublic Internet\u201d meets the internal \u201cGoogle Cloud\u201d where their data reside. In hand-printed letters, the drawing notes that encryption is \u201cadded and removed here!\u201d The artist adds a smiley face, a cheeky celebration of victory over Google security.<\/strong><\/p>\nTwo engineers with close ties to Google exploded in profanity when they saw the drawing. \u201cI hope you publish this,\u201d one of them said.<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
For the MUSCULAR project, the GCHQ directs all intake into a \u201cbuffer\u201d that can hold three to five days of traffic before recycling storage space. From the buffer, custom-built NSA tools unpack and decode the special data formats that the two companies use inside their clouds. Then the data are sent through a series of filters to \u201cselect\u201d information the NSA wants and \u201cdefeat\u201d what it does not.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
And if they rely on SSL, well, that\u2019s ok for buying a book online, but no tinfoiler in his right mind would bet his life on SSL. —The Ugly Truth About Online Anonymity What’s the difference between Paranoid Conspiracy Theorist and I told You So? About six years. Via: Washington Post: The National Security Agency […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,22,21,4,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-covert-operations","category-dictatorship","category-infrastructure","category-surveillance","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37629"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37630,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37629\/revisions\/37630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}