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-o

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.