Recent reports point to National Security Agency tapping fiber-optic cables for back-end access to data, specifically those of a fiber-optics firm called Level 3, which supplies Google and Yahoo. In response, more and more IT companies are employing encryption on transfers between data centers.

Former Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens was ruthlessly mocked in 2006 when he famously said that the internet is "a series of tubes." But, in essence, he wasn't wrong. Despite the tech talk about "The Cloud," referring to various corporate data centers where users can store all manner of information, those data centers are connected by a series of - ahem - fiber optic wires.

According to a recent New York Times report, it's now suspected that the way the National Security Agency got its unprecedented back-end access to Yahoo and Google data - which was exposed recently by the Washington Post, based on documents provided by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden - was by old-fashioned tapping into those fiber optic wires.

Those wires, until recently, ran unencrypted data from Google and Yahoo between its various data centers. The wires are not owned by those IT companies, but rather by fiber-optic firms like Verizon Communications, Vodafone Group, and Level 3. The last fiber-optic company, based in Denver, may not ring a bell to your average person, but Level 3 is a bigger fiber-optic provider than Verizon and AT&T combined, according to the Times, and provides fiber optics for both Google and Yahoo.  

Level 3 didn't respond specifically to the claims in the report, which itself, was based on three unnamed sources and tentative in its assertions, using the language "fingers have been pointed at Level 3" to indicate the company's possible involvement - witting or otherwise. Instead, Level 3 only replied with the statement, "It is our policy and our practice to comply with laws in every country where we operate, and to provide government agencies access to customer data only when we are compelled to do so by the laws in the country where the data is located."

In response to the revelations that the NSA was tapping data from internal transmissions between data centers, both Google and Yahoo have stated that they are now encrypting the data that runs on those cables.

Those revelations came in Oct., when the Washington Post reported that the NSA sent "millions of records every day from Yahoo and Google internal networks to data warehouses at the agency's Fort Meade headquarters." Those millions of records included metadata - data about senders and receivers of communications without the actual content of those messages - but also text, audio, and video, all in the span of about a month.

Unlike the PRISM program, which gets information using the "front door" and requires consent from the IT company, this particular NSA program, called MUSCULAR, involved the wholesale copying of "entire data flows across fiber-optic cables," according to the report.

Besides Google and Yahoo, which were specifically mentioned in the Snowden leak exposing the NSA's MUSCULAR, Microsoft is reportedly meeting this week to decide how and when to begin encrypting its own in-house data transmissions as well.