Google and Yahoo outraged that the NSA tapped its cables

Google and Yahoo reacted with anger as reports emerged that the US National Security Agency and its British counterpart had apparently tapped the fibre-optic cables connecting overseas servers of the two technology giants and were copying vast amounts of e-mail and other information.

In partnership with the British agency known as Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the US spying agency used weak restrictions on its overseas activities to exploit major US companies' data to a far greater extent than previously realised, The Washington Post reported citing NSA documents leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden.

NSA collection activities abroad face fewer legal restrictions and less oversight than its actions in the United States.

Google and Yahoo said that they were unaware of government accessing of their data links. Sarah Meron, a Yahoo spokeswoman, said the company had not co-operated with any government agency for such interception, and David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer, expressed outrage.

"We have long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping, which is why we have continued to extend encryption across more and more Google services and links," Drummond said.

In an interview with Bloomberg News on Wednesday, NSA director general Keith Alexander was asked if the NSA had infiltrated Yahoo and Google databases, as detailed in The Washington Post story. "Not to my knowledge," he said. "We are not authorised to go into a US company's servers and take data. We'd have to go through a court process for doing that."