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So, let's pull out Occam's Razor:

- choice A: Google is logging all unencrypted communications from their staff (a rather vast amount of information altogether, I suspect, given how Google employees throw data around), in order to be able to go back retrospectively and wade through it to find leakers

- choice B: Google grepped through Gmail to find the leaker, which they have a complete legal right to do and has a marginal cost of zero.

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Do you really think the communications of googlers is "vast" by google standards? Do you think their internal websites are as big as the internet?

Indeed. If the razor has to be applied I'd go with A because it's simple and feasible enough solution for a company like Google and because B would imply virtually zero levels of corporate worries about the eventual PR downfall. The fact that It's Arrington we're talking about here and not your next-door blogger, reinforces the probability of A being the simpler choice.

No way. It would require poring through so much more raw data to take raw tcp traffic, structure it somehow and pull out email messages (option a). Compare that against going through structured data in the gmail storage system (option b). Option B is much, much simpler.

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