Comment by jrochkind1
12 years ago
Tell me if I understand this right: Google thought it was okay to not encrypt that 'internal' traffic, because even when trans-continental, that traffic was on 'private' Google fiber carrying only Google traffic, not the public internet. It was theoretically on a network that only Google had access to.
That's why it seemed okay not to encrypt it, right? (Otherwise, I don't know why Google would have thought it didn't have to encrypt it).
But the NSA managed to tap into this 'private' fiber anyway, perhaps with the cooperation of the actual telecoms that run it?
Do I have that right?
Essentially, that is what the article seems to indicate, except that it was Britain's GCHQ, not the US's NSA, that did the tapping. The GCHQ, as part of the "Five Eyes" intelligence cooperation [1], lets the NSA do searches against the data they get from the taps.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Community