> You're right, most times organizations need a fire lit underneath them to change, for Google, it probably was the NSA annotation "SSL added and removed here :^)" on a slide showing Google's architecture from the Snowden leaks.

As an insider, it was not. The move to zero-trust started with "A new approach to China": https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-chin...