For those unaware, the "SSL Added and removed here!" image is a reference to a diagram describing unencrypted communications between Google datacenters that leaked from the NSA in 2013 [1].
Once I had a professor who had a top secret clearance and did some government work. He couldn't reference this because it's never been unclassified. But in one of his courses, he had an image of these two circles aligned just like this when discussing a relevant topic, and I don't know if anyone in my section picked up on it.
Still kind of insane to think about the US government using underwater submarines or something to hack into the communications of US companies to spy on Americans and that not being, like, a bigger deal in 2013.
The hesitance around that time to prosecute political leaders who were obviously breaking the law is, I think, a big part of what lead to our current era of political leaders who are now, in effect, entirely above the law. James Clapper's "not wittingly" testimony[1], where he plainly and purposely lied under oath during a congressional hearing and received zero consequences, is another example where we showed we will not hold political leaders accountable for their actions. It became clear during that decade that the law has no teeth, so why should political leaders not break the law at every opportunity if it serves them? And here we are.
I am convinced [1] most people can fall into handling anything with levity. You see the same thing happening in the medical field, and undoubtedly in more macabre organisations as well (see WW2 testimonies, for example).
[1] Unsourced learned experience, consider with a grain of salt.
I know Cloudflare used to support unencrypted backends, but they encourage SSL on the origin machine too. It might be with a Cloudflare signed "origin cert" but it's SSL either way
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/new-docs-show-ns...