NSA Caught Siphoning Data from Google, Yahoo Servers

The National Security Agency has tapped fiber-optic cables that connect Google's and Yahoo's overseas servers and accessed vast amounts of data including email and other personal information, according to a Wednesday report in The Washington Post.

Included in the data culled by the NSA is information on hundreds of millions of users, many of whom are American, the Post reported, citing documents obtained by NSA contractor Edward Snowden along with interviews with other officials.
The NSA's acquisition directorate reportedly sent millions of records daily from internal Yahoo and Google networks to a data warehouse at the agency's Fort Meade, Md., headquarters.

NSA is "a foreign intelligence agency," Vines concluded, "and we're focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets only."

We Are Outraged'

Both Google and Yahoo stressed that they did not participate in the NSA's data collection.

"We have long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping, which is why we have continued to extend encryption across more and more Google services and links," said David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer. "We do not provide any government, including the U.S. government, with access to our systems.

"We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks," Drummond added. "It underscores the need for urgent reform."

Similarly, "we have strict controls in place to protect the security of our data centers," Yahoo spokesperson Lauren Armstrong told TechNewsWorld. "We have not given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency."