In October, Washington Post published a secret document leaked by former Intelligence agency contractor Edward Snowden stating of alienation of 300 million users personal information.
Internet companies Yahoo and Google publicly accused The National Security Agency in secretly breaking their database.
The common version of the NSA implication to this incident in which it has tapped the data links between Internet tech companies that allowed the spy agency to access supposedly protected data links to collect data on millions of users in real time around the world, underpinned by affiliation of the report to NSA’ snooping program. The information included not only metadata but also content.
Google and Yahoo have protected their data centers with full-time security systems such as heat sensors and iris scanners that, in fact, makes hard to believe how one can get access to these corporations’ databases. Logical to assume, this must be a hardest task ever. Though, there is a way to bypass through it. And NSA knows it.
The likely reason of how to breakthrough the security chain was outside the companies’ control, where the “information was unencrypted”.
The fiber-optic cables that connect data centers around the world became a weak link that caused that interception. Recently, Yahoo and Google have announced about the data moving across these cables started encrypting.
Last month, when the information leaked to press, Internet companies denied of providing any access to their systems to any state: “We do not provide any government, including the US government, with access to our systems”. It’s quite reasonable to assume that unauthorized access provided externally, possibly from potential Internet Connection companies like Verizon Communications, BT Group, Vodafone Group and Level 3 Communications.
The most likely suspected is Level 3, the world’s largest internet backbone provider, whose cables are used by Google and Yahoo.
Level 3 has not, and probably cannot, answer a direct question about facilitating government spy, admitted Nicole Perlroth and John Markoff in a New York Times article.
Though, company stated that: “It is our policy and our practice to comply with laws in every country where we operate, and to provide government agencies access to customer data only when we are compelled to do so by the laws in the country where the data is located,” – Times.
However, another financial document was found and published by Perlroth and Markoff. It arranges the agreement between Level 3 and US government which “imposes significant requirements on us (com),” including something they call only ‘other matters’.”
“We are party to an agreement with the U.S. Departments of Homeland Security, Justice and Defense addressing the U.S. government’s national security and law enforcement concerns”,- it states.