NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers …

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.

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 NSAs acquisitions directorate sends millions of records every day from internal Yahoo and Google networks to data warehouses at the agencys 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 e-mails and when, as well as content such as text, audio and video.

The NSAs principal tool to exploit the data links is a project called MUSCULAR, operated jointly with the agencys 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.

In a statement, the NSA said it is focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets only.

NSA applies Attorney General-approved processes to protect the privacy of U.S. persons minimizing the likelihood of their information in our targeting, collection, processing, exploitation, retention, and dissemination, it said.

In a statement, Googles chief legal officer, David Drummond, said the company has long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping and has not provided the government with access to its systems.

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, he said.

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NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers ...