The NSA-GCHQ code name for these attacks was Muscular. On one level, it was helpful in explaining that the companies were not willing accomplices. “It provided us a key to finally understand what was going on,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, told Wired magazine. “We had been reading about the NSA reportedly having a massive amount of data. We felt that we and others in the industry had been providing a small amount of data. It was hard to reconcile, and this was a very logical explanation.”
