The change was made exactly in response to PRISM. In fact, it was something that was already rolling out at the time, but the disclosure of that program caused the effort to be dramatically accelerated. At this point, and for quite some time, they've been using encryption for almost all traffic on the internal network.
you think that the thousands of NSA employees whose mission it is to collect and analyze that data just sat around and declared defeat after they started encrypting it? lol
I don't think the NSA has thousands of people to dedicate to the slurping of Google's data specifically. More like hundreds, if even that.
But I mean if your position is that the NSA has cracked modern encryption technologies, then I guess you better get off the internet. Whether you use Google or not, you're screwed.
i'm sure they've cracked some of them and can brute force others faster than anyone realizes. but they also are probably very good at targeting specific people/machines and getting the encryption keys they want, especially if its being used to encode a large amount of data. i keep a low profile and avoid doing illegal things so i'm not really concerned but it still sucks that privacy is disappearing because its convenient and profitable
this is just naive