Government gangsterism: NSA’s ‘MUSCULAR’ Program Secretly Invaded the Google and Yahoo Servers

By Alfredo Lopez

What a week! Shortly after Secretary of State John Kerry admitted that maybe our government had gone "too far" in its surveillance programs, the Washington Post dropped another Edward Snowden bombshell demonstrating that it is going a whole lot farther than we knew.

If Kerry's ersatz admission -- couched in a defense of National Security Agency surveillance -- provoked a collective yawn from many who follow these developments, the latest Snowden stuff snapped us to attention. The Post published an article detailing the NSA's interception of information coming in and out of Google and Yahoo servers over non-public, internal network fibre optic lines. In December, 2012 alone, the program (revealingly called "MUSCULAR") processed 181,280,466 Google and Yahoo records that included email, searches, videos and photos.

Up to now, the NSA has defended its actions by telling us it is combatting terrorism through the capture of data in a public space, the Internet, after obtaining court orders. This shows they were lying. MUSCULAR is the theft of about 25 percent of all Internet data from two of the most popular data handling companies with no court orders or advisories in complete defiance of the law and our rights. It is, quite simply, government gangsterism.

And it brings into focus the most important question: why? Because this isn't about counter-terrorism, not with that many records and their surreptitious capture. This is about surveillance and analysis of the daily communications of an entire country and much of the world.

The technology of MUSCULAR, a program jointly carried on by the NSA and its British counterpart, isn't hard to explain. Essentially, technologists at the spy agency have figured out a way to intercept data being exchanged among servers that store everything you do on Google and Yahoo.

Here's the difference between this and other previously revealed spying programs. Your data travels over the Internet to get to those servers and be stored there. For others to see what data you've stored, it must travel out, again over the Internet. That's legally protected data and the NSA (at least theoretically) needs a court order to remove it from those servers. The FISA court (the NSA's blessing source) almost always rubber stamps NSA requests so it's pretty easy to conduct that kind of data extraction but at least there is still a record of what the NSA is looking for and why and some grounds for taking legal action against it.

Muscular doesn't go near the data as it's traveling on the Internet or while it's on those servers. Instead it intercepts data that's already been stored and is traveling through non-public connections between each company's many servers as the companies synchronize stored data or transfer it internally...

For the rest of this article by ALFREDO LOPEZ in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new uncompromising four-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/muscularrevelations