14 DAY TRIAL // During the Code Conference, Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin took the stage and talked about a number of topics, including the NSA mass surveillance.
The exec said that revelations of National Security Agency surveillance were a huge disappointment, both to him and the world as a whole, Re/Code reports.
Brin admits that some level of surveillance for the sake of national security may be appropriate, but nothing close to what’s been happening. He explains that spying on a few foreign generals to prevent nuclear annihilation during the Cold War was one thing, while spying on the entire world through Internet traffic in the modern age is a completely different matter.
“I think the balance looks really different and I guess I don’t know that anyone reevaluated that,” he said during the conference.
Brin mentioned that Google had already started to secure its backbone traffic before the media reports about NSA’s efforts to break into the links between Google’s and Yahoo’s data centers even landed.
This indicates that most likely, Google figured out that it was only a matter of time before such a report was delivered, especially considering the things revealed in previous articles based on leaked documents.
As a reminder, Snowden’s files revealed that the NSA had managed to breach the links tying the data centers of companies such as Google and Yahoo, thus gaining access to unencrypted content. This allowed the NSA to bypass asking Google for access to user data records, getting a warrant, court order or any other type of legal permission.
Google engineers reacted badly at the news that the NSA had infiltrated the connection linking its data centers, even resorting to swearing, especially after all the hard work they did to secure everything else.
Brin said that Google had been building up its security, including by encrypting its backbone traffic by approaching 1,000 talented people for its security division. The NSA scandal has impacted a lot of companies in the tech industry in the United States, including Google. Internet companies in particular have received a rather big hit, especially following revelations that the encrypted connections that users thought they were enjoying were easy to crack by the NSA’s agents.
Google, as well as other companies, have started upgrading their security, bumping its SSL keys to 2048-bit RSA certificates, making it infinitely more difficult to hack, while also securing all in and out connections for all its services.