WASHINGTON – The US National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links connecting Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, the Washington Post reported Wednesday.
The newspaper cited classified documents leaked by former defense contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials to disclose the NSA operations against the Internet companies.
According to a top secret accounting dated January 9, 2013, the agency “sends millions of records every day from Yahoo and Google internal networks to data warehouses at the agency’s Fort Meade headquarters.”
In the preceding 30 days, field collectors had processed and sent back over 180 million new records including “metadata,” which would indicate who sent or received emails and when, as well as text, audio and video, according to the report.
By tapping those links, the agency could collect at will from among hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans, the newspaper reported.
The NSA’s main tool to exploit such data links is a project called MUSCULAR and operated jointly with the agency’s British counterpart, GCHQ.