Two Google engineers burst into profanity on seeing NSA smiley face on diagram of user info intercepts via fiber optic links between data centers

Google's Lake Manawa Data Center
in Council Bluffs, Iowa (courtesy Google Maps)

The Washington Post has published another NSA Powerpoint slide from Edward Snowden. The paper says two engineers "with close ties to Google" were furious when they saw the evidence of NSA perfidy, illustrated by a smiley face in the center bottom of the hand drawing:

     According to a top-secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, the NSA’s acquisitions directorate sends millions of records every day from internal Yahoo and Google networks to data warehouses at the agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade, Md. In the preceding 30 days, the report said, field collectors had processed and sent back 181,280,466 new records — including “metadata,” which would indicate who sent or received e-mails and when, as well as content such as text, audio and video.
     The NSA’s principal tool to exploit the data links is a project called MUSCULAR, operated jointly with the agency’s British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters . From undisclosed interception points, the NSA and the GCHQ are copying entire data flows across fiber-optic cables that carry information among the data centers of the Silicon Valley giants.

     Bloomberg reports that the company's top lawyer isn't very happy with the NSA:

     Google was “outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks,” David Drummond, the company’s top lawyer, said in a statement.
     “We do not provide any government, including the U.S. government, with access to our systems,” and the spying “underscores the need for urgent reform,” Drummond said.

In a not-so-veiled threat, NSA Chief Gen. Keith Alexander warned that curbing his keyhole enthusiasm might result in making the U.S. more vulnerable to terrorist attacks.


Would you buy a used car from General Keith Alexander?

In the video above, Alexander insisted that the NSA does not have "direct access" to Google and Yahoo servers, and that it gets info through FBI court orders and that NSA requests numbered in the thousands not millions. While Alexander was misleading his audience, WaPo/Snowden were exposing the following (bracketed comment added by AKSARBENT):

According to a top-secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, the NSA’s acquisitions directorate sends millions of records every day from internal Yahoo and Google networks [by tapping into fiber optics outside the data centers] to data warehouses at the agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade, Md. In the preceding 30 days, the report said, field collectors had processed and sent back 181,280,466 new records — including “metadata,” which would indicate who sent or received e-mails and when, as well as content such as text, audio and video.