NBC News
How the feds snoop: What happens when you hit send on your email
By Stephanie Gosk and Jeff Black

The Internet makes it easy to send information to far flung places in an instant – hit “send” and poof there it goes. But where does that information go, how does it get there and who gets access to the data?

Every second of every day billions of bits of data speed through an elaborate network, many created and controlled by companies such as Yahoo and Google.

Indeed, the latest leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, first reported by the Washington Post and confirmed by NBC News, say that NSA has tapped into Google and Yahoo's data cables and vacuumed up emails and phone records, although security official say Americans are filtered out.

Big tech companies — among them Facebook, Microsoft, AOL and Apple, in addition to Google and Yahoo — say the worry they’re losing an arms race to secure their users’ information and have called on new laws to stop U.S. intelligence agencies from breaking into data centers.

Those data centers, often misleadingly called the “cloud,” in reality have nothing ethereal about them. They’re thousands of miles of cables and high-tech switchers and computers. They’re warehouse-sized buildings that hum with servers to collect and store huge reams of data.

“For your email account you know you can have years worth of data stored in your account,” Kim Zetter of Wired magazine told NBC News.

Google alone has six such large datacenters in the United States, and another seven are overseas.

“A lot of people think if I'm in the U.S., my data is stored in the U.S., and that's really not the case,” Zetter said.

Jim Stickley, a cyber security expert, said it's those cables where the vulnerability lies.

“You have thousands and thousands of miles of cable out there of this fiber optic cable,” Stickley said. “And so presumably the NSA has founds somewhere to gain access to this cable and physically attach some sort of device to capture date on this network.”

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