What’s on tap at the NSA? Google’s and Yahoo’s private fiber backbones

If you needed more proof that our nation’s industrial surveillance complex has gone completely off the rails, look no further than today’s Washington Post. There you will find another blockbuster story on NSA spying that should make your blood boil, assuming it isn’t already hot enough to cook an egg.

Bottom line: The spooks are tapping into private fiber backbones operated overseas by Google and Yahoo, decrypting all the traffic before it gets into their private clouds, storing copies, and re-encrypting it before sending it on its way. Yes, this is another gift from Edward Snowden.

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Per the Post’s Barton Gellman and independent security wonk Ashkan Soltani:

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.

The story is accompanied by a hand-drawn illustration showing how and where the wires get tapped, along with a smiley face indicating (one assumes) a happy NSA agent now swimming in unencrypted data.

Yahoo and Google: Not happy campers

Unlike PRISM, in which major tech firms respond to legal requests for data from the spooks, this program, known in NSA parlance by the code name “Muscular,” appears to be a complete surprise to both Google and Yahoo, who sound none too happy about it. The difference between each tech company’s fierce denial of the original claims about PRISM — that they had allowed the NSA “direct access” to their networks — and their response to this revelation is pretty telling. Per the Post article:

In a statement, Google said it was “troubled by allegations of the government intercepting traffic between our data centers, and we are not aware of this activity….”

At Yahoo, a spokeswoman said: “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….”

Two engineers with close ties to Google exploded in profanity when they saw the drawing. “I hope you publish this,” one of them said.

Because the data interception takes place outside U.S. borders, it is not governed by any U.S. law or overseen by any government entity besides the NSA and its British counterpart, the GCHQ. Even if traffic to, from, or about a U.S. citizen passes over the link — and that’s pretty much guaranteed, given the amount of local data caching large providers like Google and Yahoo do — it gets scooped up and analyzed by those two agencies.

According to the Post’s breakdown of the Snowden files, the Muscular program “relies on an unnamed telecommunications provider to offer secret access to a cable or switch through which the Google and Yahoo traffic passes.”

This is most likely also how the spooks scooped up millions of address books from Yahoo, Gmail, Facebook, Hotmail, and the rest. Now the guessing game begins: Which international telecom gave the spooks the keys to their data centers and told them to help themselves? My guess is all of them.

Stripped down to the bone

Feeling naked yet? Because I’m definitely feeling a bit exposed myself.

The upshot of all of this warrantless, watcherless spying is that the spooks now have far more data than they can possibly analyze — some 60GB a day at the time these documents were created, with plans to double that amount. And not just metadata, but the actual content of emails and other Web traffic.

They’re like bulemics at an all-you-can-eat data buffet, taking trips to the bathroom so that they can come back for seconds and thirds. At the same time, these documents show that even the spooks think most of this stuff is of “low intelligence value.”

Why are they collecting it, exactly? What good is it really doing? Are the theoretical plots that have been allegedly thwarted, which consist mostly of a lot of vague assertions with little actual evidence, reason enough for this gross violation of our civil rights?

At what point do we say enough is enough? And if enough of us say it, will anyone listen? Post your thoughts below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “What’s on tap at the NSA? Google’s and Yahoo’s private fiber backbones,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, follow Cringely on Twitter, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.