Yep, for better or worse it's a digital life now. Good luck opting out of the cloud for your bank transactions, your health insurance claims, Amazon orders, etc. Our emails, chats and cat videos are but a small part of sensitive data that we have stored in somebody else's data centers; cynicism and Luddite rejection of the few items we can "take back" like email servers will not help much. The only solution is to fix the system. At Google, and other conscious internet services, we're doing everything we can. But users and voters have to help too. For example, yesterday it was revealed that the NSA has been able to successfully MITM users connecting to SSL-protected Google services. Now I don't want to use this to plug Google Chrome, but if you're using any browser without all bleeding-edge security features like cert pinning and PFS, then you deserve to be 0wned by various high-profile hackers.
What raidi and other said. But also, do not assume that we didn't encrypt any of the backend backbone transfers, or that some specific kind of information was exposed before -- for one thing, when we make inter-DC backups/replication of data that's already stored in encrypted form (you gmail folders and such), it's likely that we just ship this data around without bothering to decrypt and re-encrypt it, which would be wasteful and pointless. (I'm not a intimate with netops here, just making educated guesses like anybody could do.) Also there's some significant data that needs no encryption, e.g. the gobs of public youtube content that we have to mirror and cache in a thousand places.
We have tons of our own stuff moving through the same pipes (proprietary source code, all files in our corp network filesystems...), so it's our best interest to protect these. I suspect most of the unencrypted traffic is actually what the NSA would call "metadata" -- if valuable information can be mined from simple metadata like phone calls, I guess even better stuff can be derived from extremely rich RPCs/protobufs even if the core information was already in encrypted fields. Anyway the more comprehensive encryption support should turn our backbone into a wasteland for spooks.
"the NSA/CIA could just have agents infiltrated at Google, to get access to a lot of that data" -- this would be really difficult, because no single person at Google can just sudo in some system and feast over sensitive data. Any access to user data or other highly sensitive data needs to go through a stack of authorizations, the granted access will be scoped, and we have obsessive amounts of logging in place even for trivial stuff let alone sensitive systems and data. One thing that surprised me with the Snowden leaks is that the NSA's "checks and balances" seems to be orders of magnitude inferior to what we have at Google; something like that is unimaginable here (esp. if you can believe the NSA in that they don't even know which documents were accessed). Even a conspiracy involving several infiltrated googlers at the right places couldn't do it without anyone noticing, because they'd need to sabotage code and configurations that live in repositories that thousands of engineers have access to (and have enforced code-review workflows); the internal openness of our systems is in fact among our best defenses against sabotage.
Muslim? Baptist? If there's one thing that SF always got right, is getting rid of religion, projecting a future of increasing secularism/agnosticism. Star Trek is a good example, Gene Roddenberry was an atheist and he made ST as much agnostic/atheistic as he could get away with.
What I found astonishing with the Light of Other Days is that with the massive sharing of pictures and videos on social network and the advent of Google Glass, it seems that at a point in the near future will be able to "browse" what's currently happening in the world from multi view point in real time. At the time it was released it was clearly science fiction, now not so much, it seems.
The "unshakeable forgettery of the author", and also the surprising nature of the ending for many readers, may be caused by the well-known fact that Asimov was a staunch Atheist, so you wouldn't normally expect even an oblique theogony to come out his typewriter. :)
When I came to Google for my onsite interview, in the group of people scheduled for that day there was this guy with an alpha-nerd attitude including a Rubik cube that he kept playing effortlessly -- he could completely scramble the thing and then solve it in seconds almost without looking at it. I was never able to solve more than two faces of Rubik in my life :) fortunately no stupid puzzles at all in the interviews (at least not in mine), I got in. The Rubik guy, never saw again. FWIW.
