In a bid to protect the huge amounts of user data from the watchful eyes of the NSA, Google is racing to encrypt its data centers across the world. Now doing so won’t stop NSA from entirely collecting information about you when you’re using Google services, but it will slow them down. Instead of accessing your raw data, then end up with a bunch of 0’s and 1’s, which will take them much longer to decode.
Chris Soghoian, a privacy expert at the American Civil Liberties Union, states to Ars Technica,
Google has data centers around the world and when you have an e-mail stored, it’s stored at [something like] six data centers around the world, every single bit of data is now going to be encrypted, so now if the government is listening to that fiber, they won’t get that data.
The encryption initiative was initially approved last year, but saw only significant advances in June. This is a measure to guard Google’s reputation as a reliable source of information in spite of the NSA’s PRISM program. This is a clandestine, top-secret, mass surveillance, data mining effort by the U.S Intelligence community to collect user information by utilizing the resources of large Internet companies. This includes accessing e-mails, stored data, IM’s and various other points of communication. Unfortunately, Google remains as one of the PRISM companies.
But at the end of the day, all of these efforts only slow down the NSA’s attempts to access user data. Encryption standards only complicate government efforts to mine data. They will require more time and energy to fetch raw data, which as we hope could drive the government to focus on it’s priority targets, such as terrorism, abduction, trafficking and so on.
“If the NSA wants to get into your system, they are going to get in. This is all about making dragnet surveillance impossible.” adds Chris Soghoian.