4 ms·

I was there when it happened, and basically the entire engineering org was pissed off at the NSA. It went from ongoing project to "we're flipping the switch wit

I was there when it happened, and basically the entire engineering org was pissed off at the NSA. It went from ongoing project to "we're flipping the switch within a month" or something like that.

refurb 6y ago
Why were they pissed at the NSA? I thought Google cooperated with the NSA to provide access. Or did I misunderstand the situation?
- jeffbee 6y ago
  There is nothing in Snowden's leaks to support this conclusion, much to suggest that it is false, and Google flatly denies cooperating with the NSA in clear, non-weasel-word terms. https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html
  - refurb 6y ago
    Well there you go. I guess it was my own assumption based on one of the PRISM slides that show when surveillance for each company started.[1] I assumed it involved cooperation. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/media/File:Prism_slide_5.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/...
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      Well, that's court-ordered production of data based on given search terms. Being ordered by a court to do something is not the opposite of "cooperation" but it's not the same thing either. What Googlers were angry about was the stuff in the leaks that showed they were tapping undersea cables.
      - refurb 6y ago
        I see. So they were aware of some data collection, because the court forced them to, but there was other collection going on they weren't aware of.
jeffbee 6y ago
Snowden's powerpoint decks clearly implied that NSA had tapped Google's transatlantic fibers. But it also seems to suggest that they weren't getting access to Google data from Google, because if they were, they wouldn't need to grep for some guy's email address in a packet capture and display it as a hex dump. Some NSA guy thought it was a big enough accomplishment to document in a presentation that they had managed to grep for gmail.com and surface one pretty useless RPC body, which tells me that their access to and understanding of the data was very poor. FYI the slide in question appears here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/11/04/how-we-know-the-nsa-had-access-to-internal-google-and-yahoo-cloud-data/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/11/04...

I was there when it happened, and basically the entire engineering org was pissed off at the NSA. It went from ongoing project to "we're flipping the switch within a month" or something like that.

refurb 6y ago

Why were they pissed at the NSA? I thought Google cooperated with the NSA to provide access. Or did I misunderstand the situation?

jeffbee 6y ago
There is nothing in Snowden's leaks to support this conclusion, much to suggest that it is false, and Google flatly denies cooperating with the NSA in clear, non-weasel-word terms. https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html
- refurb 6y ago
  Well there you go. I guess it was my own assumption based on one of the PRISM slides that show when surveillance for each company started.[1] I assumed it involved cooperation. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/media/File:Prism_slide_5.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/...
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    Well, that's court-ordered production of data based on given search terms. Being ordered by a court to do something is not the opposite of "cooperation" but it's not the same thing either. What Googlers were angry about was the stuff in the leaks that showed they were tapping undersea cables.
    - refurb 6y ago
      I see. So they were aware of some data collection, because the court forced them to, but there was other collection going on they weren't aware of.

jeffbee 6y ago

Snowden's powerpoint decks clearly implied that NSA had tapped Google's transatlantic fibers. But it also seems to suggest that they weren't getting access to Google data from Google, because if they were, they wouldn't need to grep for some guy's email address in a packet capture and display it as a hex dump. Some NSA guy thought it was a big enough accomplishment to document in a presentation that they had managed to grep for gmail.com and surface one pretty useless RPC body, which tells me that their access to and understanding of the data was very poor. FYI the slide in question appears here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/11/04/how-we-know-the-nsa-had-access-to-internal-google-and-yahoo-cloud-data/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/11/04...