NSA Mimics Google, Pisses Off Senate

Wired, 07/17/12

In 2008, a team of software coders inside the National Security Agency started reverse-engineering the database that ran Google.

They closely followed the Google research paper describing BigTable—the sweeping database that underpinned many of the Google’s online services, running across tens of thousands of computer servers—but they also went a little further. In rebuilding this massive database, they beefed up the security. After all, this was the NSA.