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Comment by rvschuilenburg | Hacker News Reader

What happened here then? http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-tee...

Aurora [1] helped a lot to make stuff even more secure internally. They care a lot about privacy as once that's gone they'd see their users gone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora

Check the date, it's before the China attacks.

So internal security has been ramped up after the China attacks. How? In part:

  On 4 February 2010, the Washington Post reported, “Google
  approached the NSA shortly after the attacks, sources
  said, but the deal is taking weeks to hammer out,
  reflecting the sensitivity of the partnership. Any
  agreement would mark the first time that Google has
  entered a formal information-sharing relationship with the
  NSA.” EPIC rapidly submitted a Freedom of Information
  request to the NSA requesting any documents pertaining to
  this NSA/Google relationship. The NSA’s response was
  Glomar – a refusal to confirm or deny that any records
  exist.

So while rogue employees might become less likely, rogue (NSA) agents hardly become less likely.

I totally get it though: Security and operations at the largest search engine in the world is a matter of national security. I think this new Google-NSA relationship is inevitable, though it could be a bit more transparent.

It is unlikely Google was asking the NSA to help secure their data-centers, it is more likely that Google was sharing information on the attacks and asking if the NSA had any corroborating evidence about it's source in the People's Liberation Army.

When tech companies face a coordinated foreign attack like this, they are looking to share attack data with one another, as well as the government, in order to form a complete picture of the attacker.

Let's put it this way. I could let you sit at my desk, give you my password, even let you edit code and try to submit it, and you would not be able to do anything harmful except perhaps get some of my personal data off my own hard disk. I'd even let you install a keylogger and it wouldn't help. You might be able to see internal design docs of unreleased Google products, but you would not be able to invade user privacy. That ship has sailed.

I agree with most you say. For me the question was more "could the NSA gain access at Google?" instead of "would the NSA gain access at Google?". If the Chinese could gain access to version control from the outside, then the NSA being on the "inside" shouldn't face a lot more problems. Else they could always try it from the outside.

A lot of confusion seems to stem from "direct access" and "collected directly from the server" anyway. I personally don't believe the NSA would ever install a backdoor at Google. There are probably other ways that don't involve direct access that are more in compliance with the law (which should be the main focus).

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