Google is accelerating efforts to speed up end-to-end encryption between its worldwide data centers, the company told The Washington Post on Friday.
In light of the NSA’s continued digital spying efforts—along with other government hacking threats from nations such as China, Russia, the U.K. and Israel—Google has accelerated its 2012 encryption initiative, which is scheduled for completion months ahead of schedule.
Google’s enhanced end-to-end encryption—where data is encoded at its starting point and decoded at its ending point—should protect Google against direct fiber taps of the massive amounts of information transported and stored by its worldwide data centers, according to the article in the Post.
“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,” Chris Soghoian, a privacy expert at the American Civil Liberties Union, told Ars Technica. “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 end-to-end encryption effort was described by Soghoian as “Google addressing the threat of interception one piece at a time.”
