You don't need to tap dark fiber for this to be poor security. They were passing all internal data around in clear text. It would have been trivial for any data

You don't need to tap dark fiber for this to be poor security. They were passing all internal data around in clear text. It would have been trivial for any data center employee to gain significant amounts of open data this way. Why wouldn't you have services, db connections, etc. encrypted internally? Its certainly possible and done within many companies, it is surprising how lax google was in their assumption that once inside the network everything is going to be a-ok.