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by asuffield 2422 days ago
> 2. Participation in project PRISM

I'm an ex-Googler, and I know how PRISM worked. This did not happen. All the statements made in https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html are true at the time they were written. The sentiment in the title of that post accurately reflects how everybody involved felt about it.

(I can't talk about whether they're still true because I've not been there in nearly two years, I wouldn't know)
4 comments
londons_explore 2422 days ago
I can agree with this.

Google was not innocent in the matter (there is clear public evidence internal Google data got into the hands of the NSA), but it appears that data was stolen due to poor security of Google's systems rather than handed over voluntarily. Google underestimated the abilities of their adversary. I don't believe any other company back then would have been resistant to the same attack.

There is sufficient evidence in the leaked snowden docs and public blog posts to figure out what the bug was and how it has been fixed.

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mdrachuk 2422 days ago
> I'm an ex-Googler, and I know how PRISM worked. This did not happen.

But from the blog:

> We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday.

Does not match up

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Youden 2422 days ago
Sure it matches up.

The poster, today, is aware of how PRISM worked.

The blog author, then, was not aware that PRISM existed.

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londons_explore 2422 days ago
A small but not insignificant number of employees move between the security services and Google each year.

In fact, the design of the NSA's interception nodes, rulesets and filtering systems resemble strongly many of Google's internal technologies (as evidenced by a leaked config file in the snowden documents)

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kerng 2422 days ago
Still remember the picture from the NSA with a line between two Google data centers and the Google frontend terminating SSL and traffic between datacenter being in cleartext. And there was this big smiley face from the NSA on the slide!
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tgsovlerkhgsel 2422 days ago
How sure are you that you would have known if there was collaboration?

It's not as if that would be widely announced, even internally.

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