The article conducts a fairly scrupulous analysis of what politicians and officials are saying, and likely is correct in its assertions. However, it doesn't mention (within the same post) that the NSA has been operating DPI gear at the carrier level for a long time now. Mainstream media has overlooked this fact more often than not recently.

DPI sitting on carrier pipes is what the Room 641A scandal in 2006 was about. Its disclosure helped kick off the warrantless wiretap debate we're currently having. Virtually every NSA whistleblower since has mentioned the operation of Narus devices.

Consider the following:

A) NSA is confirmed to be operating Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) devices on internet backbone fiber-optic cables within the United States, with telecom cooperation.

B) The recent revelation that Verizon has been providing NSA call metadata and routing information (but not content) on a massive scale. Obviously not just Verizon, but every major telco.

C) Construction of NSA's Bluffdale, Utah data storage facility is almost complete. The storage capacity varies depending on who you ask, but most conservative estimates put it at a scale such that it can hold the entirety of the world's communications well into the foreseeable future.

It's not rocket science they're already intercepting and storing the content of traffic. The Verizon metadata and routing information is certainly used in conjunction with DPI for attribution and deduplication of intercepted traffic.

It's a simple matter of 1 + 1 + 1 = 3.

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Except the number of operands is more likely in the double digits. If I may indulge in speculation and conduct some quotation analysis of my own:

OP's article cites many officials hinting that what we currently know, even in light of the recent debate, is only the tip of the iceberg. However, in my opinion the foremost quote in this regard occurred seven years ago:

In 2006, Russel Tice, NSA whistleblower, was quoted as saying:

"In my case, there's no way the programs I want to talk to Congress about should be public ever, unless maybe in 200 years they want to declassify them." [1]

OK, 200 years is probably a bit of an embellishment, especially if you listen to Singularity folks who suggest the human race won't even be the human race by then.

However, Tice explicitly mentioned this in context of a "different angle" from the warrantless intercept operations just seeing the light of day at the time. [2]

If he wasn't even talking about what's currently being debated in the media, then what was he referring to?

My guess would be something on the analysis side of the equation. Perhaps collection and subsequent analysis of mobile device geolocation data.

Imagine employing the technique of geofencing on individual citizens at a national or even global scale. Non-targeted individuals entering within a certain radius of targeted individuals at sufficiently similar velocity for a specific duration or frequency could end up drawing suspicion upon themselves. Combined with other data points, individuals who are societal outliers in terms of behavior could be detected with ease.

Or, maybe it's that and more. There's all sorts of enterprise-class big data simulation products out there where you can simulate an environment in extremely fine-grained fashion using a near-unfathomable amount of data points.

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TL;DR - The notion that NSA isn't getting everything is laughable. Comprehensive, retroactive surveillance is already a reality.

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1. http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2006/07/10/hoekstra_blow...

2. http://thinkprogress.org/security/2006/05/12/5319/more-unlaw...