Over the past six months Grosse and his team had sealed up every crack the NSA had brilliantly exploited. Grosse called the unencrypted links between Google’s data centers “the last chink in our armor,” and he was now encrypting Google data internally. Other companies were following suit and migrating to a stronger form of encryption called Perfect Forward Secrecy, which made it far more labor-intensive for NSA to decode their data. Google was also now laying its own fiber-optic cable beneath the world’s oceans and rigging it with sensors that would alert the company to undersea taps.
