NSA Broke Into Links Between Google, Yahoo Datacenters

barlevg writes "The Washington Post reports that, according to documents obtained from Edward Snowden, through their so-called 'MUSCULAR' initiative, the National Security Agency has exploited a weakness in the transfers between data centers, which Google and others pay a premium to send over secure fiber optic cables. The leaked documents include a post-it note as part of an internal NSA Powerpoint presentation showing a diagram of Google network traffic, an arrow pointing to the Google front-end server with text reading, 'SSL Added and Removed Here' with a smiley face. When shown the sketch by The Post and asked for comment, two engineers with close ties to Google responded with strings of profanity." The Washington Post report is also summarized at SlashBI. Also in can't-trust-the-government-not-to-spy news, an anonymous reader writes: "According to recent reports, the National Security Agency collects 'one-end foreign' Internet metadata as it passes through the United States. The notion is that purely domestic communications should receive greater protection, and that ordinary Americans won't send much personal information outside the country. A researcher at Stanford put this hypothesis to the test... and found that popular U.S. websites routinely pass browsing activity to international servers. Even the House of Representatives website was sending traffic to London. When the NSA vacuums up international Internet metadata, then, it's also snooping on domestic web browsing by millions of Americans."

Comments

Re:As long as you make the distinction between

[Enter the Shoggoth]

Americans and us dangerous foreigners, expect no sympathy. One does not have to believe in Karma to know that you deserve the domestic spying.

By that same line of thinking, one could also say that you deserve to be spied upon and drone-striked, due to your blanket, wholly uninformed generalizations about Americans.

I wouldn't say that, because I'm not an egocentric dick... but someone could, and it would be just as invalid and moronic as your hypothesis.

You're a fool if you don't realise that the cultural belief in "American exceptionalism" has been the enabler for the NSA and the "Military Industrial Complex" that Eisenhower spoke of.

Wrong, choice is between who will get noticed

[SuperKendall]

The only problem is what your choice is between John Jackson, and Jack Johnson or Kang and Kodos

While true it ignores the fact that while Kang and Kodos are essentially the same, only violations by Kang get much outrage in the press, while Kodos gets a free pass as it were.

With the press as we have it being 90+% Democrats, who do you expect stories like the NSA issues to get anything but a passing mention? Just look at the outrage in the media if a Republican does ANYTHING wrong.

If you really, really want low information voters to be informed of wrong doing, then you should do your best to promote the party where the press will actually serve the function it is supposed to. But if you keep voting in people from a party that are very nearly in collusion with the press; well, what result do you expect?