Except that&#x27;s demonstrably not what the NSA was doing; they were sniffing the backbones at the switches, presumably because they <i>didn&#x27;t</i> want to create any sort of paper trail or get warrants, even secret FISA ones, against particular people.<p>From Google&#x27;s perspective, it means they have to be involved, however non-consensually, in the process, rather than having it done to them transparently.  So I can see why it&#x27;s a win for them.<p>Whether it really matters to Joe Random User is arguable.  What Joe User really ought to demand is end-to-end encryption rather than transit encryption, but he&#x27;s unlikely to do that because key management across multiple devices (and who wants to read their email only on a single device?) is a pain and the companies that would be able to make it less of a pain aren&#x27;t exactly incentivized to do so.