Comment by tptacek

>Google owns tens of thousands of miles of it

If this haven't already I imagine they will be hiring security forces to patrol and inspect.

I think they do now. There has to be some sort of sense of personal professionalism of the many highly qualified security experts working at Google, that is hurt by the revelations that the NSA basically fucked them over and drew a slide with a smiley face on it about how they fucked them over.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/google-enc...

“It’s an arms race,” said Eric Grosse, vice president for security engineering at Google, based in Mountain View, Calif. “We see these government agencies as among the most skilled players in this game.”

With governments around the world (see Brazil and India) now banning Google products for official government use, I can imagine overall usage of Google products will decline outside of the U.S.

This is a threat to Google's international business. They have a vested financial interest in reducing the hacking against their systems.

There's greater risk of facing problems of all sorts when you have rogue agents on the inside (what if they get found out? how will that be met by news journals? people who find out about it? the trust dynamics between CEOs and government agencies that request access in a legal way, when needed?).

The risk of things going wrong when you're tapping cables is much less pronounced as far as I can see.

I'm not sure why you think that's so easy to do. You need a person who:

1. Has the technical credentials and interviewing skills to get hired at Google (not easy). 2. Has a security clearance. 3. Wants to be a spy. 4. Can get themselves assigned to the team working on datacenter interconnects. 5. Can set up a tap on the interconnect without getting caught.

That sounds both hard and expensive to me.

From their perspective, why not tackle the additional attack vectors?

As for the internal mole, I'd imagine that any such individual's role would be highly focused. They'd be used to tackle specific target information rather than the wholesale siphoning tapped cables would provide. Aside from the simple logistic issues with the sheer amount of data they're tapping, I can't imagine how anyone could be in a physical position to do so across the entire Google network without tripping at least <i>one</i> internal safeguard?

For bulk collection, the taps enable surveillance without the possibility of detection unless the NSA screws the proverbial pooch. And if there's one thing history can tell us, it's that surveillance agencies will spend obscene amounts of money in pursuit of that undetectability. From the Project Azorian with the Glomar Explorer to the Berlin tunnels in Operation Gold, the Cold War alone proves the point.

Apparently unconstrained by resources, they decided to attack from multiple angles.