According to new documents from Edward Snowden, both British and Us intelligence agencies have tapped into the data centers run by Yahoo! and Google. In one month this year, they slurped 181,280,466 records, including metadata and the contents of communications.

The operation, dubbed MUSCULAR, and reported by the NSA’s acquisitions directorate, both the NSA and Britain's GCHQ tapped the fiber-optic transmission cables from the non-US data centers run by the two firms.

Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, told the paper in a statement: "We do not provide any government, including the US government, with access to our systems. We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks, and it underscores the need for urgent reform.”