Does Google work for the NSA?

NSA broke into Yahoo and Google data centers

• Is the NSA that damn good to break through the security systems of the Internet giants or do Google and Yahoo just look the other way when it is the government doing the snooping? 
• The NSA has reportedly struck deals with technology companies to install hidden access points in their equipment that can be used for surveillance.

The latest Edward Snowden documents claim the NSA has worked with its British counterpart, GCHQ to collect entire data flows across fiber-optic cables in a project codenamed MUSCULAR, said the Washington Post.  It reported:

According to a top secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, NSA’s acquisitions directorate 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, the report said, field collectors had processed and sent back 181,280,466 new records — ranging from “metadata,” which would indicate who sent or received e-mails and when, to content such as text, audio and video.

General Keith Alexander, director of the NSA, said on Wednesday in an interview on Bloomberg Television that that the agency is “not authorized to go into a U.S. company’s servers and take data,” reports the Wall Street Journal.

The Washington Post reported that the agency "has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world."

According to documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the agency is intercepting emails, documents, and other electronic communications as they move between the companies' privately controlled facilities and the public Internet, giving the NSA access to data in nearly real-time.

"The most enduring setback on national security from all of this could well be the impact on U.S. companies," observed a former U.S. official intimately involved with intelligence matters.

"We've created a Huawei problem for these companies," this official said, referring to the Chinese telecommunications firm that many U.S. lawmakers and intelligence officials believe is a proxy spy for the Chinese government.

The NSA has reportedly struck deals with technology companies to install hidden access points in their equipment that can be used for surveillance.  And the agency is believed to be the biggest purchaser of so-called "zero day" vulnerabilities, which are flaws in a piece of hardware or software discovered by a hacker but never revealed publicly.


See more at The Washington Post and at The Cable Foreign Policy.com

Asshole Alert
“You can’t have your privacy violated if you don’t KNOW your privacy is violated”
Congressman Mike Rogers
GOP Chairman of House Intelligence Committee
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Big Brother loving "Conservative" Republican Mike Rogers of Michigan has a lifetime American Conservative Union rating of 89.5%.  That again brings up the question of what exactly is a conservative?  Does Rogers understand that a Bill of Rights even exists?  Does he even care?  Just because you favor "security" does not mean you believe in Constitutional freedom.  Historically thugs from Caesar to Napoleon to Mao have also favored "security".
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See Mike Rogers at hearings.
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