NSA CHIEF ADDRESSES REPORT THAT AGENCY TAPS INTO GOOGLE, YAHOO DATA LINKS

The National Security Agency doesn’t have access to servers run by Internet giants Google and Yahoo, its chief said in a pushback to a Washington Post report that theU.S. spy network taps into overseas data links to slurp up millions of text, video and audio records every day.
But Gen. Keith Alexander’s comments at a cybersecurity conference Wednesday don’t appear to address the substance of the newspaper’s allegations — that the NSA has found a way to tap into the data as it moves between servers around the world without many of the restrictions imposed by U.S. law and court oversight, CNN reports.
Asked about the report by a Bloomberg Television reporter who interviewed him on stage at the conference, Alexander denied breaking into servers or databases run by Internet companies.
“Not to my knowledge,” he said in response to a question about tapping into company databases.
“It would be illegal for us to do that. So, I don’t know what the report is,” Alexander said. “But I can tell you factually we do not have access to Google servers, Yahoo servers. We go through a court order.”
However, the allegations published by The Post — based on documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden — aren’t that the NSA has hacked into data centers or databases owned by the companies.
Instead, the newspaper — citing the Snowden documents and unnamed “knowledgeable officials” — reported that the NSA gets access to the data as it passes through vulnerable points overseas on its way to databases around the world.
According to The Post, the NSA and the British Government Communications Headquarters found a way to exploit a weakness in Internet architecture to copy data as it moves from the public Internet into data centers maintained by the companies.
The agency then uses custom-built software to decode the companies’ internal data formats and filter the resulting data for information it wants to collect, the newspaper reported.
The material collected under the program — code-named MUSCULAR — includes e-mail addressing information, as well as “content such as text, audio and video,” according to The Post.