NSA Hacked Search Engines’ Datacenters

[Atreides]

The press has recently run a chilling story about the NSA hacking into the Google and Yahoo datacentres. According to the NSA papers, seen by the reporters, the National Security Agency carried out “full takeâ€, “bulk access†and “high volume†operations on both Yahoo and Google networks.
 

Such large-scale harvesting of online data would be illegal in the US, but it looks like the operations took place overseas, where the spooks were allowed to presume that anyone using a foreign data link is a foreigner.

An ex-NSA chief analyst admitted that the agency has platoons of lawyers, whose task is to figure out how to stay within the law while maximizing data collection by exploiting every loophole.

The search giants maintain fortresslike data centers across 4 continents, connected with thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable. For instance, Yahoo’s internal network is transmitting entire e-mail archives from one data center to another, which is when the agency could pounce.

Security experts point out that tapping the Google and Yahoo clouds would allow the National Security Agency to intercept communications and view the content at its leisure. NSA agents had to circumvent gold-standard security to get the information. In the meantime, the weak point might have been some of the premium data links that Google and Yahoo have been buying or leasing.

According to the insiders, they had reason to believe that their private, internal networks were safe from prying eyes, but apparently not.