>What the NSA means by this is that it has root access on Google, Facebook and friends. This just simply isn't true. The article doesn't say that. Your support

>What the NSA means by this is that it has root access on Google, Facebook and friends. This just simply isn't true. The article doesn't say that. Your support for this claim below is that this is what they meant by "direct and unilateral," which you cannot know to be true. If Google et. al. setup dedicated servers which aggregate the relevant user data the NSA wants, and gave the NSA FTP access, then this would be--by definition--direct and unilateral access. FTP falls under any reasonable definiton of direct, and Google would not have to be involved in any data transmission, thereby making it unilateral. And can't we all just agree that the idea of giving root access is so outright ridiculous that nobody would intend that as a meaning? Maybe read only access, but root access? Ridiculous.