Actually the summary of that whole segment seemed to simply be that,
1. google is really good at tracking users
2. NSA became very interested in that fact.
3. NSA piggybacked on Google's tracking without them knowing.
I didn't get that they were saying google knew that the tracking cookie was being used in this way. Only that they were setting the example of how best to spy on people.
It seems to really break down when dealing with parenthesis and other kinds of punctuation that uses matching. Just from my personal testing on the linked page it got really confusing when they got to the founders section about "Frank Waldman (CEO and Co-founder), Maik Maurer (CTO and Co-founder)"
The parenthesis here, rather than showing a complete group, end up getting broken apart and stuck to whatever word they're adjacent words. "...Co Founder)"
Not only does China use the best date format but they also only have one time zone for the whole country and DON't practice DST (summer time). If only the whole world could adopt this policy it would solve a lot of headaches.
I didn't get that they were saying google knew that the tracking cookie was being used in this way. Only that they were setting the example of how best to spy on people.