I missed this article at the time by Bruce Schneier and I think a lot more did, too, or didn't pay much attention to it, but according to him, Google already gave NSA a backdoor into Gmail, which is what the Chinese hackers used to hack them then:
That is not an NSA backdoor and I'm shocked Schneier could make such a mistake, it is a system to comply with FBI/local police court orders. The Chinese hackers couldn't run queries on gmail accounts, all they got access to was archives of court ordered material that had already been copied into the system, see here: http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/20/4349236/chinese-hacker-gma...
Basically, when a company needs to hand over data, they copy it and put it somewhere for law enforcement to pick up, and apparently the Chinese hackers got access to the drop box.
"Backdoor" makes it sound like Google built a query page that allows the NSA to enter in an arbitrary account name and just get the data -- on anyone.
> "Backdoor" makes it sound like Google built a query page that allows the NSA to enter in an arbitrary account name and just get the data -- on anyone.
Now there's an idea. Now let's hope it's an original thought and nobody has had that idea before you.
Note that Google blatantly lied about the motivations of the hackers, shamefully claiming that the intent was to target dissidents. Pretty consistent with the narrative in the article, to say the least.
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/01/23/schneier.google.ha...