Last week, it was revealed that the National Security Agency had managed to tap into the private connections between Google’s supposedly secure data centers, effectively giving the agency unfettered access to e-mails, voicemails, and cloud-stored files of all Google users. Not surprisingly, this isn’t sitting well with the people at the Internet giant.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal (see video below), Google Inc. Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt called the NSA’s actions “outrageous,” and said his company has filed complaints with the NSA, the White House, and Congress about “The steps that the [NSA] was willing to do without good judgment to pursue its mission and potentially violate people’s privacy.”

What’s particularly galling, says Schmidt, is that the NSA cast such a ridiculously wide net in its snooping.

“The NSA allegedly collected the phone records of 320 million people in order to identify roughly 300 people who might be a risk. It’s just bad public policy…and perhaps illegal,” he told the Journal. “There clearly are cases where evil people exist, but you don’t have to violate the privacy of every single citizen of America to find them.”

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