Googlers say “F*** you” to NSA, company encrypts internal network

[Wilikon]

Edit: Thanks to Lethn for reminding me to post the original article's link
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/googlers-say-f-you-to-nsa-company-encrypts-internal-network/

Google has started to encrypt its traffic between its data centers, effectively halting the broad surveillance of its inner workings by the joint National Security Agency-GCHQ program known as MUSCULAR. The move turns off a giant source of information to the two agencies, which at one point accounted for nearly a third of the NSA's daily data intake for its primary intelligence analysis database—at least for now.

Yesterday, the Washington Post shared additional slides produced by the NSA on the MUSCULAR program, which tapped into the fiber-optic networks carrying traffic to and from Google's and Yahoo's overseas data centers. The slides indicated that data from the networks frequently reached the daily intelligence briefing provided to President Barack Obama. They cited the joint operation with GHCQ as the fifteenth-largest source of intelligence data for those briefings.

The slides also revealed that the NSA obtained an intimate understanding of the internal operations of these networks, which suggests it either launched a significant reverse-engineering operation to pry apart Google's and Yahoo's secrets or it obtained this information from people who worked for the two companies (maybe even some combination of the two). Either way, the effort amounts to a major intelligence operation to discover the trade secrets of two major American companies.

[...]

“Fuck these guys”

Last Thursday, as news started to emerge about the NSA's monitoring of traffic within the private networks of Google and Yahoo, Google security team engineer Brandon Downey wrote a post to Google+ expressing his personal opinion on the matter: "Fuck these guys." Yesterday, another Google security engineer, Mike Hearn, echoed the sentiment with substance:

"I now join [Downey] in issuing a giant Fuck You to the people who made these slides," Hearn wrote. "I am not an American, I am a Brit, but it's no different—GCHQ turns out to be even worse than the NSA... The traffic shown in the slides is now all encrypted and the work the NSA/GCHQ staff did on understanding it, ruined."

Hearn did not reveal how the traffic was being encrypted. But Google has been making an effort to encrypt its intra-data center traffic for over a year as it strove to deal with potential surveillance.

That effort was accelerated this summer in the wake of the leaked information about the NSA/FBI PRISM program—the warrant-based program by which the NSA could obtain access to user data from Google, Yahoo, and other cloud providers. The company wanted to make broad surveillance of its own networks more difficult. Now, with the details of actual surveillance public knowledge, Google has moved to shut the door entirely to unfettered access to its networks. Google also started to encrypt all search requests from users by default in September, protecting users from surveillance outside its network.

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[Lethn]

Stop posting this shit without providing any links to backup what you write.

[Spendulus]

Google has started to encrypt its traffic between its data centers.....

No.

Never believe anything they say.

[Nik1ab]

Just PR shit.

[fluidjax]

Just PR shit.

Agreed, if a security claim can't be verified, it has no value.

[Schleicher]

Here's Mike's post:
https://plus.google.com/+MikeHearn/posts/LW1DXJ2BK8k

[Wilikon]

Stop posting this shit without providing any links to backup what you write.

Thank you.

[Anon136]

google was all about cooperating with the nas when it was profitable. thankyou edward snowden so much for making it no longer a profitable proposition 

[Lethn]

Stop posting this shit without providing any links to backup what you write.

Thank you.

lol! Sorry if it sounded like I lost my temper but there's so much crap posted on here particularly by conspiracy theorists etc. it gets really annoying sometimes

[Nik1ab]

I won't use google ever again either way. 

[Wilikon]

Stop posting this shit without providing any links to backup what you write.

Thank you.

lol! Sorry if it sounded like I lost my temper but there's so much crap posted on here particularly by conspiracy theorists etc. it gets really annoying sometimes

I have learn a long time ago to keep my blood pressure stable while on forum so no need to apologize 

[Spendulus]

Stop posting this shit without providing any links to backup what you write.

Thank you.

lol! Sorry if it sounded like I lost my temper but there's so much crap posted on here particularly by conspiracy theorists etc. it gets really annoying sometimes

I have learn a long time ago to keep my blood pressure stable while on forum so no need to apologize 

So 2 people in Google say FuckU to the NSA and minions.  That only leaves something like 25,000 other Google employees that we can presume are saying FuckU to you and me.

No, Google will not ever get back it's "Do No Evil" by line.

[Wilikon]

Stop posting this shit without providing any links to backup what you write.

Thank you.

lol! Sorry if it sounded like I lost my temper but there's so much crap posted on here particularly by conspiracy theorists etc. it gets really annoying sometimes

I have learn a long time ago to keep my blood pressure stable while on forum so no need to apologize 

So 2 people in Google say FuckU to the NSA and minions.  That only leaves something like 25,000 other Google employees that we can presume are saying FuckU to you and me.

No, Google will not ever get back it's "Do No Evil" by line.

The "Do No Evil" line was targeting the users when you think about it. Do no evil and, you know, you won't have to scrub your name then change it to get a job.

[cooldgamer]

Really wish I could believe they're encrypting their stuff, but without any proof it's just another thing they're saying to avoid controversy.  Even if they did, for all we know they could be giving the NSA their keys.  A big company like Google isn't going to go up against the government, they don't care about us, they care about the dollars in their pocket.

[beetcoin]

i used to think google was a decent company. but by the day, i'm starting to think differently.. especially with them trying to force people onto google+, which is junk anyways.

[fluidjax]

i used to think google was a decent company. but by the day, i'm starting to think differently.. especially with them trying to force people onto google+, which is junk anyways.

And herein lies the real problem with capitalism, the decision made to give the shareholders what they want (money),  doesn't always give the general population/users what they want.
The objectives are different and we are being persuaded to believe that the goals are the same, they are not.

Do you really think that the NSA will say 'o well, never mind' now goggle is encrypting traffic. They have almost unlimited power to 'prevent terrorism', Google's gesture is, simply that, a meaningless gesture.

[Wilikon]

http://theweek.com/article/index/252729/how-silicon-valley-turned-on-president-obama

In the months leading up to the 2012 presidential election, Silicon Valley was squarely in President Obama's corner.

Google's executive chairman coached Obama's campaign team; executives from Craigslist, Napster, and Linkedin helped him fundraise; and when the dust settled, Obama had won nine counties in the liberal and tech-heavy Bay Area, scoring 84 percent of the vote in San Francisco. But a little over a year later, following explosive allegations from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that the government is exploiting tech companies to spy on Americans, some members of Silicon Valley are taking a new perspective: "F--- these guys."

That's what Brandon Downey, a security engineer with Google, wrote late last month, upon learning that the NSA had broken into Google and Yahoo and was exploiting the data of millions of users, allegedly without the companies' knowledge. He added, "We suspected this was happening, [but] it still makes me terribly sad. It makes me sad because I believe in America...The U.S. has to be better than this."

Executives at Google, which issued a polite denial when the first revelations about PRISM came out, were publicly furious over the new revelations (which the NSA denied): "We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks," David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer, told The Verge. This is the same company that in October 2012 gave $342,409 to Democrats and only $37,250 to Republicans, according to data from OpenSecrets.

Many techies may be regretting such investments. "There's a strong libertarian streak that dampens support for the Obama administration... Entrepreneurs don't like the government telling them what they can or can't do with their bodies or their wallets," says Craig Montuori, a Caltech aerospace engineer who designed data systems for the Chris Christie campaign in 2009 and worked in the field for Obama in 2012.

"I personally donated to the Obama campaign in both 2008 and 2012, and given the recent revelations, I would certainly reconsider doing the same in the future," Sina Khanifar, a programmer and activist who helped launch Stopwatching.us, a coalition demanding more information about NSA surveillance efforts. "One of the biggest advantages the Obama campaign had in the last election cycle was the technical team that wrote their grassroots organizing software. The NSA revelations have seriously damaged technologists' trust in government, and I think recruiting a similar team for the next elections would be much more difficult."

Jonathan Nelson, who has been programming since he was seven, is the founder of Hackers and Founders, which assists tech startup entrepreneurs, and has 11,000 members working out of Silicon Valley. He tells The Week, "Our hopes were that the Obama administration would hold true to their promises and end these [surveillance] programs. But instead, they've expanded to unimaginable levels. That's been crushingly disappointing for many in our community."

[lucaspm98]

 If it is true, more power to them. If it isn't true, I wouldn't be surprised at all.

[Spendulus]

http://theweek.com/article/index/252729/how-silicon-valley-turned-on-president-obama

In the months leading up to the 2012 presidential election, Silicon Valley was squarely in President Obama's corner.....

You know, they may just have learned their lesson.  I'm sure they still want their big government "Democratic vision", even though they are being ordered onto the fascist bandwagon.

Regardless, one interesting thing to mull over is this...

Where does all this lead in 50 years?

Seems to me it is rather unthinkable.

[Wilikon]

http://theweek.com/article/index/252729/how-silicon-valley-turned-on-president-obama

In the months leading up to the 2012 presidential election, Silicon Valley was squarely in President Obama's corner.....

You know, they may just have learned their lesson.  I'm sure they still want their big government "Democratic vision", even though they are being ordered onto the fascist bandwagon.

Regardless, one interesting thing to mull over is this...

Where does all this lead in 50 years?

Seems to me it is rather unthinkable.

Every science fiction movies got it wrong about how our Dystopian Megacities will be: they could not foresee Bitcoin nor dubstep music... So 50 years now feels like 1000 of years in the future.

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