Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen Say Google Data Now Protected From Gov't Spying

An anonymous reader writes "Google's Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen were [part of a] wide-ranging session at SXSW today and they revealed that Google's data is now safely protected from the prying eyes of government organizations. In the last few days Google upgraded its security measure following revelations that Britain's GCHQ had intercepted data being transmitted between Google datacenters, Schmidt said that his company's upgrades following the incident left him 'pretty sure that information within Google is now safe from any government's prying eyes.'"

Comments

Safe just from prying eyes?

[CRCulver]

Sure, the data might be safe from a government's prying eyes, but will it be safe from a government who kindly asks for the data, with the company acquiescing between it wants to maintain its lucrative business links with the authorities?

Re:Safe just from prying eyes?

[louarnkoz]

Governments can indeed ask for some data, using subpoena or in the case of the US "National Security Network." But for that, they have to actually ask, and the request has to be targeted, naming for example a specific individual. The NSA and the GCHQ were not content with that, they wanted to grab "everything," so instead of the legal channels they used a hack. The hack was to spy on the internal network of Google, and of other services as well, because these internal exchanges were not encrypted.

According to Eric Schmidt, now they are. This is absolutely good news. It is also exactly what the Electronic Frontier Foundation is asking web services to do. You can check the relative state of Google and other services according to the EFF at: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/....

Re:Liar

[houstonbofh]

There is a very broken, hazy line between marketing and lying.

I thought they were synonyms...