> To have the email of arbitrary Americans without a warrant, the NSA would need direct access to the servers that run Google Mail. Not really. They would only

> To have the email of arbitrary Americans without a warrant, the NSA would need direct access to the servers that run Google Mail. Not really. They would only need to get every incoming and outgoing e-mail forwarded/copied to one of their servers. That's not strictly "direct access to Google's servers". At least for incoming e-mails, it would also simply suffice to listen in on some backbone node while having access to Google's private keys to circumvent the TLS encryption (let's ask Larry about those instead).