NSA INFILTRATES GOOGLE & YAHOO DATA CENTERS, WORLDWIDE: Washington Post, Oct. 30, 2013--The U.S. Pentagons 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. By 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. According to a top-secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, 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, MD. 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 emails and when, as well as content such as text, audio and video. The NSA’s principal tool to exploit the data links is a project called MUSCULAR, operated jointly with the Agency’s 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 among the data centers of the Silicon Valley giants. 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 U.S. companies. . .until now. In a statement, Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, said Google has “long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping,” and has not provided the Government with access to its systems, adding: 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.” A Yahoo spokeswoman said, “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.” Under PRISM, the NSA gathers huge volumes of online communications records by legally compelling U.S. technology companies, including Yahoo and Google, to turn over any data that match court-approved search terms. That program, which was first disclosed by The Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper in Britain, is authorized under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, and overseen by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). . . . Intercepting communications overseas has clear advantages for the NSA, with looser restrictions and less oversight. NSA documents about the effort refer directly to full take, bulk access and high volume operations on Yahoo and Google networks. Such large-scale collection of Internet content would be illegal in the United States, but the operations take place overseas, where the NSA is allowed to presume that anyone using a foreign data link is a foreigner. Outside U.S. territory, statutory restrictions on surveillance seldom apply, and the FISC has no jurisdiction. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has acknowledged that Congress conducts little oversight of intelligence-gathering under the Presidential authority of Executive Order 12333, which defines the basic powers and responsibilities of the intelligence agencies. . . . In an NSA presentation slide on “Google Cloud Exploitation,” a sketch shows where the Public Internet meets the internal Google Cloud where their data reside. In hand-printed letters, the drawing notes that encryption is added and removed here! The artist adds a smiley face--a cheeky celebration of victory over Google security. Two engineers with close ties to Google exploded in profanity when they saw the drawing. I hope you publish this, one of them said. . . . Because digital communications and cloud storage do not usually adhere to national boundaries, MUSCULAR and a previously disclosed NSA operation to collect Internet address books, have amassed content and metadata on a previously unknown scale from U.S. citizens and residents. Those operations have gone undebated in public or in the U.S. Congress, because their existence was classified. . . . “Thirty-five years ago, different countries had their own telecommunications infrastructure, so the division between foreign and domestic collection was clear,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the U.S. Senate Intelligence panel, said in an interview. “Today, there’s a global communications infrastructure, so there’s a greater risk of collecting on Americans when the NSA collects overseas.” It is not clear how much data from Americans is collected, and how much of that is retained. One weekly report on MUSCULAR says the British operators of the site allow the NSA to contribute 100,000 selectors, or search terms. That is more than twice the number in use in the PRISM program, but even 100,000 cannot easily account for the millions of records that are said to be sent to Fort Meade each day. In 2011, when the FISC learned that the NSA was using similar methods to collect and analyze data streams--on a much smaller scale--from cables on U.S. territory, Judge John D. Bates ruled that the program was illegal under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and inconsistent with the requirements of the Fourth Amendment.
Posted on: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 06:04:12 +0000
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