Eric Schmidt is not happy with the reports indicating the NSA broke Google's encryptions

Nov 4, 2013 10:05 GMT  ·  By

Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt is outraged by the reports that the NSA has spied on the company’s data centers.

“It’s really outrageous that the National Security Agency was looking between the Google data centers if that’s true. The steps that the organization was willing to do without good judgment to pursue its mission and potentially violate people’s privacy – it’s not OK,” Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal.

According to his statement, Google has already made formal complaints in regards with the issue, with the NSA, Barack Obama and the Congress.

He also believes that the Snowden revelations have so far assisted everyone in understanding that it’s perfectly possible that there is much more information to come.

“The NSA allegedly collected phone records of 320 million people in order to identify roughly 300 people who might be at risk. It’s just bad public policy and perhaps illegal,” Schmidt said during the interview.

According to a recent report, the NSA has been tapping into the inter-data center communications of Google and Yahoo, collecting bulk user data.

The program used to do this is called MUSCULAR and is operated by the NSA and their British counterpart, the GCHQ. Communications between data centers are intercepted and redirected into those of the intelligence agencies.

This means they can get access to all the data the two agencies have on their users, which sums up to over one billion people.

The US intelligence agency already had its hands on data from these companies through the PRISM program, but MUSCULAR managed to break in the encryption set in place. Basically, everything that’s inside the cloud can be read by the NSA without them even having to work too hard for it.

According to the report, in the 30 days leading to January 9, 2013, the NSA intercepted over 181 million records from Google and Yahoo.