Yahoo's denial of willingly giving "direct access" to the National Security Agency may be intact, but that doesn't mean that the NSA didn't have it, according to new revelations from former NSA contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Leaked documents provided to the Washington Post have shown that the NSA was able to secretly tap communications links "that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world," enabling the agency to collect "at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans," according to the report by the Washington Post.
NSA chief General Keith Alexander responded to the report the same day as it was published Wed., saying at a Bloomberg Government cybersecurity conference that, "NSA does collect information on terrorists and our national intelligence priorities but we are not authorized to go into a U.S. company's servers and take data."
The Washington Post report that Gen. Alexander was responding to said that, according to a top-secret document dated Jan. 9, 2013, NSA sent "millions of records every day from Yahoo and Google internal networks to data warehouses at the agency's Fort Meade headquarters." Hundreds of millions of new records were processed in the span of about a month, including metadata - the data about senders and receivers of communications, which does not include the actual content of the messages - but also text, audio, and video.
This vacuuming up of data directly from Yahoo and Google internal networks is not to be confused with the NSA's PRISM program, which was exposed earlier this summer as a court-approved, targeted, request-and-fulfill process that companies like Yahoo, Google, Apple, Facebook, and others that store information on their users have participated in with the NSA. PRISM, for all of its privacy, oversight, transparency and fourth amendment problems, is a so-called "front-door" information access program.
This new project, called MUSCULAR, according to the Washington Post report, involves whole sale copying of "entire data flows across fiber-optic cables," which carry communications between data centers and facilitate the world-wide nature of the internet as we know it.
Both Yahoo and Google representatives denied voluntarily allowing this access to NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ - a denial that, by the sound of MUSCULAR's back-door data-slurping capabilities, sounds increasingly plausible. A spokeswoman for Yahoo told the Washington Post, "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." She did not say whether Yahoo was aware such access could be essentially taken by force.
Google was more assertive in its denial and denouncement to the Post, as chief legal officer David Drummond said that Google had "long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping," stating that Google is "outraged at the length 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 Washington Post report asserted that the NSA may be using intelligence-gathering powers under the presidential authority of Executive Order 12333, which delineates broader surveillance powers and even less oversight outside U.S. territory than the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) - the law under which PRISM operates in the U.S. - allows. The secret FISA court or FISC has no jurisdiction outside of the U.S.
The NSA issued a statement denying it used the executive order to circumvent the surveillance restrictions in place in FISA, stating,
"NSA has multiple authorities that it uses to accomplish its mission, which is centered on defending the nation. The Washington Post's assertion that we use Executive Order 12333 collection to get around the limitations imposed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and FAA 702 is not true. The assertion that we collect vast quantities of U.S. persons' data from this type of collection is also not true. NSA applies Attorney General-approved processes to protect the privacy of U.S. persons -- minimizing the likelihood of their information in our targeting, collection, processing, exploitation, retention, and dissemination. NSA is a foreign intelligence agency. And we're focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets only."