As I once told a company I consult: "I urge you not to use ANY of those cloud based service. You are giving control of your data into many unknown hands." Using cloud services is a stupid rage. How can the New York Times expect any privacy in its news gathering when it outsources its email systems to Google? It can't.
Barton Gellman reports for the Washington Post: NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide, Snowden documents say
The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials.
By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from among hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot.
I doubt that this scheme is restricted to inter-data-center-traffic of Google and Yahoo. It is likely that such traffic from other large cloud services – Apple, Microsoft, Amazon etc – is also sniffed off by some NSA system.
Immediately after Gellman's report came out today the NSA head Alexander was asked about it during a Congress hearing:
National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander was forced to respond to the latest bombshell report on the agency’s surveillance activities on Wednesday, first saying he hadn’t heard of the story and then denying the substance of the story.
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“I don’t know what the report is,” Alexander said. When asked if the NSA tapped the data centers, he replied “Not to my knowledge, that’s never happened.”
The transcripts of the hearing are not out yet and it may well be that Alexander is literary right – the NSA may not tap into individual data centers – while factual incorrect. In a cloud based service multiple data centers are from a system point of view seen as one. That is also what the above NSA graphic shows. Tapping into traffic between them is no different than tapping into one of them. Alexander knows that and that makes his above statement a non-denial denial commonly also known as a lie.
It is all about 9/11, 9/11, 9/11 claim the NSA talking points (pdf) prepared for its officials and now FOIAed by AlJazeerah. The talking points are also full of lies about oversight over the NSA. Effectively there is none. None at all. The NSA is the deep state.
NSA spying is of course not about 9/11. It is in its ends about control of individuals and companies, societies and economies.
That last item is missing from all the recent reports though we can be sure that economic spying is one of the major NSA tasks. Back in 1995 an NYT piece explained:
Spying on allies for economic advantage is a crucial new assignment for the C.I.A. now that American foreign policy is focused on commercial interests abroad. President Clinton made economic intelligence a high priority of his Administration, specifically information to protect and defend American competitiveness, technology and financial security in a world where an economic crisis can spread across global markets in minutes.
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At the Treasury Department, the trade representative's office and the Commerce Department, officials say they now receive a torrent of information from the C.I.A.
Economic spying is likely the major reason why the NSA keeps taps on militarily allied heads of states like chancellor Merkel. Knowing her likely decisions on economic issues allows the United States and NSA connected U.S. banks to take advantages before those decisions are made public. One wonders how many billions per day U.S. companies steal through these schemes.
One also wonders how much longer it will take for other countries, and people like my customer, to wake up to this fact and to enforce a much stricter security regime over all their information. What about the NSA's "access it all" attitude have they yet to understand?