According to the leaked document the NSA's acquisitions directorate sends millions of records every day from internal Yahoo! and Google networks to data warehouses at the agency's headquarters at
Fort Meade, Maryland. The program operates via an access point known as
DS-200B, which is outside the United States, and it relies on an unnamed telecommunications operator to provide secret access for the NSA and the GCHQ. According to
The Washington Post, the MUSCULAR program collects more than twice as many data points ("selectors" in NSA jargon) compared to the better known
PRISM. Closely related programmes are called INCENSER and
TURMOIL. TURMOIL, belonging to the NSA, is a system for processing the data collected from MUSCULAR. According to a
post-it style note from the presentation, the exploitation relied on the fact that (at the time at least) data was transmitted unencrypted inside Google's
private cloud, with "Google Front End Servers" stripping and respectively adding back
SSL from/to external connections. After the information about MUSCULAR was published by the press, Google announced that it was working on deploying
encrypted communication between its datacenters. == Reactions and countermeasures ==