Government agencies are hacking Big Industries

Not satisfied with the bulk data it collects through court orders from internet giants Google and Yahoo, the Security Agency reportedly vacuumed up traffic from communication links between the companies’ data centers, according to documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

Google expressed outrage over the government’s actions and called for reform.
The taps of the data links allow the spy agency to collect data on millions of users, including Americans, without cooperation from the two companies and without oversight from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, according to the Washington Post, which broke the story. An Security Agency slide obtained by the Post even shows where the Security Agency has presumably exploited a weakness in Google’s encryption to siphon the data.

The NSA project, codenamed MUSCULAR, is operated jointly with the UK spy agency GCHQ. Both agencies copy entire data flows that pass through fiber-optic cables linking one Google data center to another. It does the same with Yahoo, at times sucking down so much information that analysts complained about the quantity.











The companies whose servers are being mined are reportedly Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. The classified program, dubbed PRISM, has been in operation since 2007 and has been a leading source of intelligence fed to the president in his daily intelligence briefings, according to the Washington Post, which broke the story at the same time as the Guardian today.

Microsoft was the first to cave into the requests in 2007, though Apple resisted for five years before joining the club last year.

Dropbox is on the government’s wishlist for other servers in its sights. Presentation slides describing the program indicate that surveillance of Dropbox is “coming soon,” according to the Post, which says the companies have been given immunity from lawsuits through a directive signed by the attorney general and the director of national intelligence.

“Google cares deeply about the security of our users’ data,” a company spokesman told the Guardian. “We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government ‘back door’ into our systems, but Google does not have a ‘back door’ for the government to access private user data.”

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