Washington Post report Wednesday that the NSA secretly broke
into communications links to Google and Yahoo servers
overseas.
Army Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA director, pushed back
against the report that cites leaked classified documents, saying
the agency does not illegally access the servers of Internet
companies.
"The servers and everything we do with those, those companies
work with us. They are compelled to work with us. This isn't
something the court just said, 'Would you please work with
them and throw data over it.' This is compelled. And this is
specific requirements that come from a court order," Alexander
said at a cybersecurity conference in Washington.
"This is not NSA breaking into any databases. It would be
illegal for us to do that. So, I don't know what the report is. But
I can tell you factually we do not have access to Google servers,
Yahoo servers. We go through a court order."
The Washington Post report is the latest in a series of
allegations that stem from disclosures given to news
organizations by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor
who describes himself as a whistle-blower.
The operation is code named MUSCULAR, and it is operated
jointly by the NSA and its UK counterpart, the Government
Communications Headquarters, The Washington Post reported,
citing the documents.
According to The Post, the NSA and the Government
Communications Headquarters are copying data flowing
through fiber-optic network cables overseas, and the NSA sends
millions of the records from Yahoo and Google to data
warehouses at its headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland.
There is no oversight of the NSA operation because it is
occurring overseas out of the reach of the court, according to
the report.
But Alexander said that was not true, and that a court order
must be issued to the Internet companies.
"We issue that court order to them through the FBI. And it's not
millions, it's thousands that are done. And it's almost all against
terrorism and other things like that," he said. "It has nothing to
do with U.S. persons."
The report raised the concern of Google and Yahoo, with the
Internet behemoths saying they never gave the NSA permission
to access communication links to their respective servers.
"We have strict controls in place to protect the security of our
data centers, and we have not given access to our data centers to
the NSA or to any other government agency," said Yahoo
spokeswoman Sarah Meron.
Google has "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, and it
underscores the need for urgent reform."
The newspaper report emerged a day after Alexander and James
Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, testified before a
House committee reviewing the agency's surveillance activities.
The hearing, billed as a discussion of potential changes to the
35-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, commonly
known as FISA, came after a report by the German magazine
Der Spiegel that the NSA monitored German Chancellor Angela
Merkel's cell phone. Some reports also suggest the United States
carried out surveillance on French and Spanish citizens.
Via: Cnn
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