I've always assumed the US gov't does have this computing power and that's why we spend so much on national defense. Besides, when you employ more mathematician

I've always assumed the US gov't does have this computing power and that's why we spend so much on national defense. Besides, when you employ more mathematicians than anyone else, I'm sure you can come up with some smart ways to store big data. Also, I think it would be fairly cheap to just write everything out to tapes or disk and dump them in a closet, even if you don't have the money to load them all in a database (so that you can put them online when technology improves or you have more budget/time). Further, I haven't seen where Snowden clearly retracted his 'direct access' assertion. You might keep some identifiers in a database and the whole dataset on a user can be ingested on demand from Google or whichever company (even if that means sending an automated request to Google which automatically responds by dumping data to FTP).