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by tuckerman 380 days ago
Even if the laws give them this power, I believe it would be extremely difficult for an operation like this to go unnoticed (and therefore unreported) at most of these companies. MUSCULAR [1] was able to be pulled off because of the cleartext inter-datacenter traffic which was subsequently encrypted. It's hard to see how they could pull off a similar operation without the cooperation of Google which would also entail a tremendous internal cover up.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUSCULAR
1 comments
onli 379 days ago
Warrantlessly installed backdoors in the log system combined with a gag order, combined with secret courts, all "perfectly legal". Not really hard to imagine.
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tuckerman 379 days ago
You would have to gag a huge chunk of the engineers and I just don’t think that would work without leaks. Google’s infrastructure would not make something like that easy to do clandestinely (trying to avoid saying impossible but it gets close).

I was an SRE and SWE on technical infra at Google, specifically the logging infrastructure. I am under no gag order.

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