14 DAY TRIAL // Not that anyone would think about revealing their plans to rob a bank on the Google-owned instant messaging system, but the fact that Google admitted that the government can and has wiretapped users’ conversations.
During an AMA on Reddit, Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union and an expert of surveillance technology, asked David Lieber, Google’s director for law enforcement and information security why Google was not so open about the fact that it allows governmental authorities to wiretap users’ communications.
Although Google has never claimed that the service uses end-to-end encryption, they do say that the information you share on Hangouts "will be encrypted so that it’s secure," whatever that means.
Salgado, on the other hand, happened to mention that "hangouts are encrypted in transit," which, as explained in non-technical terms by user reddit_poly, basically means that once the conversations reach Google’s end, they can do pretty much what they please with them, including wiretapping them.
Following the inadvertent confirmation, Motherboard contacted a Google spokesperson who endorsed what Salgado had been so kind to point out, namely that the messaging system doesn’t use end-to-end encryption.
No that the unintended testimonial or Google's straightforward confirmation were needed given that EFF had published a chart as a part of their Campaign for Secure & Usable Crypto which shows that Hangouts' system was just as secure as Facebook’s chat, meaning that it had passed only two of the seven examination points proposed by the organization.
Furthermore, in a transparency report published on their official site, Google revealed that they had been collaborating with U.S. authorities since 2013 giving them permission to wiretap data for legal purposes.