Google's Eric Schmidt slams NSA over 'outrageous' data center snooping and privacy invasion

Google's Executive Chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt isn't a huge fan of the NSA or its surveillance methods, it seems. Speaking to The Wall Street Journal, Schmidt declared: "It's really outrageous that the National Security Agency was looking between the Google data centers, if true." His comment follows recent reports of a nefarious tool crafted by the agency and the UK's GCHQ that accessed Google and Yahoo data lairs without permission. Schmidt also said that to "potentially violate people's privacy, it's not OK," and that the broad public scrutiny months of leaks has uncovered is unnecessary to find a few bad eggs. Referring to claims that the NSA amassed phone records of 320 million people to actually investigate more like 300, the Google exec commented: "That's just bad public policy... and perhaps illegal." Not that the search giant has any personal experience with illegal data collection, of course.