The latest from WaPo’s Bart Gellman (who also has some portion of the Snowden stolen document trove) claiming that the GHCQ operates a joint project w/ the NSA that captures from international data sync’ing between parts of the Google & Yahoo cloud, and that the NSA participates in querying it and receiving records from it:

washingtonpost.com

The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials.

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The NSA’s principal tool to exploit the data links is a project called MUSCULAR, operated jointly with the agency’s British counterpart, GCHQ.

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For the MUSCULAR project, the GCHQ directs all intake into a “buffer” that can hold three to five days of traffic before recycling storage space. From the buffer, custom-built NSA tools unpack and decode the special data formats that the two companies use inside their clouds.

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It is not clear how much data from Americans is collected, and how much of that is retained. One weekly report on MUSCULAR says the British operators of the site allow the NSA to contribute 100,000 “selectors,” or search terms.

That bit about the GHCQ “buffering” three to five days sounds like earlier stories about the GHCQ capturing that duration of material from the UK’s undersea cables. Anyway, if Gellman’s story is accurate, perhaps this is related to Le Monde’s report, I linked to above, of the French, Italians, Swedes and Israelis tapping & archiving their undersea cable terminals and then exchanging some portion of the data.