My feeling is that the NSA/GCHQ hack was arguably an unfortunate thing for them to do, although somewhat predictable, once one knows of the existence of the net

My feeling is that the NSA/GCHQ hack was arguably an unfortunate thing for them to do, although somewhat predictable, once one knows of the existence of the network topology vulnerability that was exploited. But presumably somewhere in Google someone knew about this possibility sometime back. I wonder whether there was an assumption that nobody would be clever enough to figure things out, or whether security engineers were working 24/7 to fill in the gap and just didn't get there in time. Either way, this is a good stimulus for rolling out deeper encryption.