Google and NSA team up to fend off future attacks

Google and the NSA reached an agreement that will see the security agency helping with the investigation of the latest attack of the Internet giant that supposedly carried out by Chinese hackers.

Reuters reports that the investigation won’t concentrate on finding those who are responsible for that attack, but on learning what went wrong so that Google can have a better defense in place for the future.

The NSA was approached by Google almost immediately after the attack took place, but it took a while to manage to draft an agreement that will strike a balance between privacy and national security. The arrangement says that NSA won’t be able to access or monitor email accounts or user searches, and that Google will not be sharing proprietary data with the NSA.

It remains to be seen if a spy agency can manage to resist the temptation of rummaging through such an immense amount of private data. One can understand the reasoning behind Google executives’ decision, but for a company that built itself partly on the customers’ trust that they won’t abuse the data in question, this seems like an extremely risky move.