14 DAY TRIAL // When the NSA scandal broke out several months ago, companies such as Google, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft and many more were mentioned as some of the main providers of data for the intelligence agency.
The companies were quick to deny all allegations and some even brought evidence that they fought off the agency as best as they could until they were ordered to hand over various packages of data.
Later on, it was revealed, much to the unpleasant surprise of Google employees, that the agency actually managed to hack into the link between their data centers, effectively getting access to unencrypted data.
The companies scratched their heads in wonder, without actually figuring out how their security measures could be so easily bypassed. The answer may sit with the fiber-optic cables connecting data centers around the world.
The thing they couldn’t quite get was how the NSA could infiltrate the data centers since they are locked down with full-time security and state-of-the-art surveillance that includes all the things you see in spy movies, such as heat sensors and iris scanners.
According to the New York Times, sources inside Google and Yahoo believe that the fiber optic cables were the route the spies took to end up in their data centers. Such cables are owned by companies such as Verizon, Vodafone, BT and Level 3 Communications. The suspicion lays on the latter, since it owns the cables the two companies use.
Level 3 refused to respond directly to any questions about whether it had given the US government or any intelligence agency access to data to the two companies.
Instead, the company chose the formal answer of a law-abiding company, “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.”
So that’s basically a ‘yes,’ right?