> “This is not traffic you would encounter outside of Google's internal network,” said one of the experts. The slide shows data in a format that is “only used on and between Google machines.<p>So, the NSA had physical access to data on-the-fly (obviously, that would not be how you get data that was authorized by a court order). 2 possibilities:<p>a) They went ahead and broke in physically, or<p>b) Google installed a tap for them.
I remember this[1] from Google's Blog during the first Snowden drops:
"Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers."<p>[1] <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html" rel="nofollow">http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html</a>