Google ‘outraged’ at alleged NSA hacking by US

Google are outraged that the NSA have allegedly hacked links connecting data centres operated by Google and Yahoo, following a Washington Post report based on leaks from Edward Snowden.

An executive at Google said it was not aware of the alleged activity, but said that there was an "urgent need for reform".

The NSA's director, Gen Keith Alexander, said it had not had access to the companies' computers.

"We are not authorised to go into a US company's servers and take data," he said.

But correspondents say this is not a direct denial of the latest clai.

The revelations stem from documents leaked by ex-US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, who has been granted temporary asylum in Russia and is wanted in the US in connection with the unauthorised disclosures.

The documents say millions of records were gleaned daily from the internet giants' internal networks.

They suggest that the NSA intercepted the data at some point as it flowed through fibre-optic cables and other network equipment connecting the companies' data centres, rather than targeting the servers theelves.

The documents imply that the data was intercepted outside the US.

The data which the agency obtained, which ranged from "metadata' to text, audio and video, were then sifted by an NSA programme called Muscular, operated with the NSA's British counterpart, GCHQ, the documents say.

The NSA already has "front-door" access to Google and Yahoo user accounts through a court-approved programme known as Prism.

Google's chief legal officer David Drummond said Google did not provide any government with access to its system.

"We have long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping, which is why we have continued to extend encryption across more and more Google services and links, especially the links in the slide," Drummond said in a statement.

"We are outraged at the lengths to which the government see to have gone to intercept data from our private fibre networks, and it underscores the need for urgent reform," he said.

A spokesperson for Yahoo said the company had "strict controls in place to protect the security of our data centres, and we have not given access to our data centres to the NSA or to any other government agency".

An NSA spokesperson denied a suggestion in the Washington Post article that the agency gathered "vast quantities of US persons' data from this type of collection".

The latest revelations came hours after a German delegation of intelligence officials arrived in Washington for talks at the White House following claims that the US monitored Chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile phone.

Two of s Merkel's most important advisers, foreign policy adviser Christoph Heusgen, and intelligence coordinator Guenter Heiss were sent to take part in the talks - seen as a measure of how seriously Merkel is taking the matter.