> Snowden's leaks mentioned the NSA tapping inter-DC links of Google and Yahoo, so I doubt if they had to tap links that there's a ton of voluntary cooperation.
The laws have changed since then and it's not for the better:
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.
Warrantlessly installed backdoors in the log system combined with a gag order, combined with secret courts, all "perfectly legal". Not really hard to imagine.
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.
The laws have changed since then and it's not for the better:
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/congress-passing-bill-th...