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The U.S. certainly hacked Google. That was part of Snowden's reveal. Remember the NSA slide with a little map of Google's networking and a smiley face indicatin

The U.S. certainly hacked Google. That was part of Snowden's reveal. Remember the NSA slide with a little map of Google's networking and a smiley face indicating the weak point (assuming one had an ally with a submarine and the capability to tap undersea fiber): https://www.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_404h/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2013/10/30/Local/Images/GOOGLE-CLOUD-EXPLOITATION1383148810.jpg https://www.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_404h/2010-2019/Washi... I think there's a pretty good chance the China thing happened first, though. That was 2009, and I like to hope that Google didn't the NSA's activity for over five years.

kbenson 4y ago
My understanding from someone that worked there is that they were aware of it (if not with definitive proof of who) before Snowden, which is why they started their initiative to encrypt all datacenter-to-datacenter traffic.
- kyrra 4y ago
  Googler, opinions are my own Btw, circa 2013 for those that are interested: https://www.theverge.com/2013/11/6/5072924/google-engineers-issue-fuck-you-to-nsa-over-surveillance-scandal https://www.theverge.com/2013/11/6/5072924/google-engineers-... From the WashingtonPost article on this, here's a TLDR: Google didn't use to encrypt traffic between datacenters, as the lines were wholly owned by Google, so they thought they had nothing to fear. Snowden reveled that the NSA had tapped some of these fiber lines, then reverse-engineered the network encoding for protos (it wasn't the same as GRPC now uses), and were using it to decode messages going between datacenters. This ended up speeding up an effort to encrypt all network traffic on Google's network.