In the latest news regarding the activities of the National Security Agency (NSA), we learn that the agency accessed Google and Yahoo communications links connecting the companies’ data centers. According to The Washington Post, “By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot.” In fact, the information was so vast that the NSA’s Special Source Operations complained of too much hay in the stack.

The project is called MUSCULAR, and it’s basically the other side of the coin from the previously disclosed PRISM. The latter allowed the NSA front-door access to data from cooperating web giants, while MUSCULAR is a clandestine back-door infiltration to collect any and all data that passed international boundaries between Google or Yahoo data centers. Simply put, while everyone knows Silicon Valley and telecom companies were cooperating with the NSA on some stuff, what a lot of people don’t know (and the companies themselves didn’t know until now) is that the NSA was also going behind their backs to compromise their networks. A lot of these companies probably thought there were good reasons to cooperate with the NSA, and at least by “cooperating” they had some oversight about what information was handed over. But now the whole thing just looks like a front, because the NSA had access to far more data than PRISM’s limited scope implied.

The information collected in MUSCULAR also doesn’t seem to be merely the “metadata” – information about emails or web searches – but in many cases the actual content of the messages, including attachments. Naturally, the NSA swears that it is “focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets only.” Perhaps it is, but the fact remains, millions of Americans are caught up in the dragnet for no other reason than they use technology.