NSA, UK hacked Yahoo! and Google data center interconnects – report

British and US intelligence agencies managed to tap into the connections between data centers run by Yahoo! and Google, and in one month this year slurped 181,280,466 records, including metadata and the contents of communications, according to new documents from Edward Snowden.

A report dated January 9, 2013, from NSA’s acquisitions directorate, detailed the operation, dubbed MUSCULAR, in which operatives from the NSA and Britain’s GCHQ tapped the fiber-optic transmission cables from the non-US data centers run by the two firms.