NSA controls channels between Yahoo! data centers in real time and google

The Washington Post, citing documents from Edward Snowden and the opinion of competent experts, reports that the NSA real-time monitors the communication channels between the data centers of Google and Yahoo! worldwide directly via fiber optic cables.

The code name for this project, implemented in conjunction with the British Government Communications Center GCHQ - MUSCULAR. According to published documents dated January 9, 2013, in just 30 days, 181,280,466 different user records were intercepted and processed. These are e-mail messages, including text, audio and video content, as well as metadata to identify the recipient and sender.

For MUSCULAR to work , GCHQ accumulates all traffic in a buffer that holds three to five days, as long as there is enough disk space. From this buffer, special NSA algorithms decompress and decrypt certain data formats that giants use inside their clouds. Then the data is filtered and sent directly to the NSA servers.



Apparently, traffic is intercepted without hacking SSL , between the front-end and the company's internal network, where traffic is transmitted unencrypted. On one of the slides of the presentation of the NSA “Google Cloud Exploitation”, pointing to the place where the traffic was intercepted by Google, the author drew a malicious smiley. According to The Washington Post, two engineers directly related to the Internet giant were struck by such impudence. “I hope you publish this,” one of them said.

Of course, the NSA has already denied this information. The head of the NSA, Keith Alexander, said that the agency is monitoring Internet users only in order to combat terrorism and, by law, cannot independently intercept data centers of American companies.

Google spokesman David Drummond said that “they have long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of interception” and did not provide government access to their systems. “We are outraged that the government seems to have tapped our own fiber optic networks, and this underlines the need for urgent reforms,” he added. Yahoo! spokeswoman commented on the situation as follows: “Data protection is strictly controlled in our data centers, and we did not give access to data either to the NSA or to other government agencies.”

Earlier, in Washington, a rally was held against the NSA surveillance of citizens, organized by the “Stop Following Us” coalition, in which about 2 thousand people took part.