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Comment by alexgartrell | Hacker News Reader

I know that this is a pot shot against the American legal system (especially with regard to copyright stuff), but it really makes no sense. A spy would likely be no more expensive than a legal team (in fact, he'd be subsidized by his salary at Google) and would be monumentally more effective and secretive.

Beyond that, the hard part of training a spy to get into Google would be getting a good enough computer science student involved. From there, it's really just a matter of teaching them to cover their tracks semi-intelligently. However, given what I'm sure is a mountain of completely legitimate reasons to look at user data (for example, to resolve data corruption, investigate malicious users, etc.) and an inconceivably larger mountain of user data to look at, I don't actually think it'd be that hard to get away with it.

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A surprisingly few people at Google have the authorized access to read a users GMail mailbox. It would mainly be the GMail Site Reliability Engineers, and support teams. The developers usually don't access to peoples inboxes.

Any support/SRE/developer access to a users' GMail mailbox would be logged and if they exceeded their authorized access by such as accessing a "public" persons email, They'd be fired pretty quickly.

I'm sure the auditing and control is more than enough to stop your average creeper employee from reading normal people's inboxes, but I very much doubt that it's enough to stop a very smart, very determined spy from doing the same. At the end of the day, someone has root, and that guy can do pretty much anything.

I'm confident that Google is doing a better job than pretty much anyone else, but this problem is a more or less unsolvable one.

Edited to add that another interesting idea is that the people who man the DC's are actually pretty sparse (relatively few people for a lot of servers) so it's not inconceivable that one could trigger a failure on an important box, take down a replica of the figure's mailbox, swap out the drive for RMA and then do a quick copy. I bet this would be easy.

I guess my point is that no level of internal controls at any company can actually stop a determined government. If that were true, governments, which are much more paranoid than tech companies, would have eradicated spying a long time ago.

Wow are people over-thinking this. Once again XKCD to the rescue.

http://xkcd.com/538/

> At the end of the day, someone has root, and that guy can do pretty much anything.

I do not disagree with your overall assessment, but this is not strictly true. Most good real-world security schemes don't follow the 'root is God'-model of Unix, and for good reason. It's perfectly possible to design a system where each operation performed by a "superuser" must be validated, or at least logged.

But does Google follow best practice or did they invent their own half-assed method - the evidence from the way the Chinese hacked them is the latter.

If Google were serious they should have brought out Bruces company Counterpane and put him in charge of security.

Do you have details of China's hack that show Google as being stupid in security, or does being compromised by a nation famous for hacking prove incompetence. Seriously, with the amount of value stored inside Google's computers, it seems like they are doing a pretty good job with their security systems.

Well not properly securing the system the us law enforcement used to legaly get info from google - that should have been locked down properly with hardware cypto gear so that it could only talk one way to approved system in the FBI or better still via an air gap.

Its blindingly obvious to any one with even a basic knowledge of computer security best practice.

Can you be more specific. From your post I am assuming that China hacked into Google by using a direct line the FBI has into Google's servers. Even assuming such a link exists (which I do not), 'hardware crypto gear' is still a far way away from a complete secure system. And it seems like an air gap would also inhibit the intended functionality of the system.

Security is hard, and it is even harder when any device on the internet is intended to be able to work with the system, and it is even harder when you operate one of the most valuable networks in the world.

They spearfished a pc apparently.

And systems used by your TLA's to handle law enforcement access are not available to "any device on the internet"

As I said they should be set up to only talk over a private circuit to one other end point and also have proper hardware crypto gear that is external to the systems.

separating the extraction of data and applying the decoding probably should have been done on separate systems.

Google has a massively distributed global storage infrastructure. Pulling one hard drive would get you a millionth of a million people's gmail accounts, along with a sea of other unrelated crap.

This isn't perfect, Google has already had to deal with at least one "rogue" engineer.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/14/google-engineer-spying-fire...

>I know that this is a pot shot against the American legal system (especially with regard to copyright stuff), but it really makes no sense. A spy would likely be no more expensive than a legal team (in fact, he'd be subsidized by his salary at Google) and would be monumentally more effective and secretive.

A spy would also be illegal and, more importantly, potentially very embarrassing politically. It should be clear to anyone by now, the US government doesn't care about cost or efficiency. And further, there are secret court proceedings for national security kinds of cases (of which there are literally hundreds at any given time), so there's no secrecy advantage.

UM you know governments have exemptions to those laws in fact these days all western TLA's have a statutory basis took a while in the UK's case mind you.

The US government has no such exemption. They can't put an agent into a domestic company unless there's some evidence the company is deliberately breaking the law.

Thats why a I mentioned statutory if for example the FBI had suspicions that the KGB/SVR or another state had agents within a company they would take action and they have caught a number of spies doing this.

The KGB back in the day had an entire department Line X that was dedicated to industrial espionage - Putin apparently was in this Department

Probably easier to recruit someone already inside Google than train a computer scientist spy and hope they manage to get hired by Google.

Ha .. We had the exact same thought there ;)

Why train a spy, when you can just bribe someone already on the inside?

Why pick just one when you can afford both? Penetration in depth.

Because if just one agent gets caught, you're looking at a nightmarish scandal.

You could bribe ("recruit") someone inside to spy for you...

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