[zmmmmm]

My main reaction to this was, ummm, wait - google isn't already encrypting its data internally?!

-- off topic rant --

Such a weird discontinuity in all this ... Google was prosecuted and paid a fine, despite self-disclosing, falling on its own sword and issuing an abject apology, for accidentally sniffing some unencrypted data as they drove past. This was condemned at every level by government.

Now the government is openly sniffing and capturing everything, including our encrypted traffic and deliberately trying to crack the encryption, ... and they don't think it is the slightest bit unreasonable?

How can there be moral outrage about Google's offense and not about what the government is doing that is ten times worse?

[MichaelGG]

Because most of the people outraged that Google supplied "-s 0" instead of "-s 64" when running tcpdump weren't quite bright or were not thinking it through? I've yet to hear of any intelligent reason to be upset about the WiFi collection thing.

And more precisely, it's the NSA, who has the job to break encryption. There was outrage when Carnivore was made public (late 90s?), then that AT&T room the NSA tapped that was leaked in 2006. By now, it's just taken for granted (by technical people anyways) that unencrypted communications are going to be recorded. You don't even need a state-level adversary to achieve this on a limited scale.

[magicalist]

Well, to be fair, it's not really the same people at the NSA looking at captured data who were doing the condemning. OTOH, you have senior administration members saying that they don't spy on Americans, when of course they do, or senior German administration officials outraged at the NSA's behavior, when of course they were participating all along.

I really don't know how much of it is self delusion, how much of it is just perfectly logical mental gymnastics from their perspective, and how much is just the "this is what we have to do, even if it doesn't match what's in the law" perspective on display in the nytimes piece.