On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 4:43 AM, Anthony Junk <anthonyrjunk@gmail.com> wrote: ...
It seems as if both Yahoo and Google assumed that since they were private circuits that they didn't have to encrypt.
I actually cannot see them assuming that. Google and Yahoo engineers are smart, and taping fibres has been well known for, well, "forever". I can see them making a business decision that the costs would be excessive to mitigate against taping(*) that would be allowed under the laws in any event. Gary (*) "A" mitigation was run the fibre through your own pressured pipe which you monitored for loss of pressure, so that even a "hot tap" on the pipe itself would possibly be detected (and there are countermeasures to countermeasures to countermeasures of the various methods). And even then, you had to have a someone walk the path from time to time to verify its integrity. And I am pretty sure there is even an NSA/DOD doc on the requirements/implementation to do those mitigations.