Google ‘Shocked’ The NSA Hacked Its Servers

“This is clearly an overstep,” Eric Schmidt told CNN

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The Board of Directors Chairman of Google Eric Schmidt.

Chairman and former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt says the company’s executives are shocked by allegations that the National Security Agency has been collecting data from the search engine’s servers.

“I was shocked that the NSA would do this—perhaps a violation of law, but certainly a violation of mission,” Schmidt said in an interview with CNN that aired on Monday. “This is clearly an overstep.”

According to documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the servers of both Yahoo and Google had been compromised after the NSA tapped into fiber optic cables that transmit data. The Snowden documents, as reported by the Washington Post, show that the NSA collected hundreds of millions of records from the servers in a month.

Both Google and Yahoo denied that they were aware of the data collection.

“Could they do it? Sure. Should they have done it? Absolutely not,” Schmidt said. “From a Google perspective, any internal use of Google services is unauthorized and almost certainly illegal.”

[CNN]