A "suitably clever Googler", an insider threat, is something that Google actively defends against, at multiple levels. The general assumption is that you can't

A "suitably clever Googler", an insider threat, is something that Google actively defends against, at multiple levels. The general assumption is that you can't blindly trust internal users, devices, etc. See the BeyondCorp paper for an example. The internal security infrastructure (monitoring, logging, auditing, analysis) probably consumes more CPU cycles than what's needed to run a large number of entire business out there, especially after the China incident -- remember who alerted the 30+ companies that got infiltrated. The security whitepaper gives only a hint of what's done, such as checks on former employees' accounts and so on: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/1.9.22.221/en//enterprise/pdf/whygoogle/google-common-security-whitepaper.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/1.9.22.221/en//en...