I don't think this is the case. OTOH, I'm surprised Google, after being the victim of known hacking by an intelligence agency (in pursuit of a religious extrem

I don't think this is the case. OTOH, I'm surprised Google, after being the victim of known hacking by an intelligence agency (in pursuit of a religious extremist group, presumably), consisting of malware, targeted malware/spearphishing, attacks on staff (presumably inserting trusted staff into Google in various roles), etc., didn't include bulk encryption within its network as a way to compartmentalize things. They certainly pulled out of the world's largest Internet market, locked down their employee workstations across the board (essentially banning Windows, IIRC), adopted 2FA internally, and generally have better internal security than banks or virtually any large enterprises. On the customer-facing side, they're leading in cert pinning, "ssl everywhere", etc. So not doing bulk encryption between datacenters was an oversight -- it's technically expensive to implement, which was probably a major factor. (In case it's not obvious, this isn't Google v NSA)