According to the New York Times, reports have suggested that Level 3 Communications, who controls most of the fiber optic cables that connect everyone to the Internet, may have allowed the National Security Agency to tap data from Yahoo and Google.
Yahoo and Google cried foul when a surveillance leak revealed that the NSA was already tapping on their fiber optic cables to gather data. Both companies use Level 3's optic cables to sync data with their data centers, which in turn, was vulnerable since the data that were being sent over were unencrypted.
Google's chief legal officer David Drummond released a statement at the time, and said, "(The company was) outraged at the lengths to which the governments seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks."
After that report, both companies announced that they will start encrypting data with a 2048-bit key encryption from henceforth.
Level 3 in its defense, released a statement and said, "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."
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