This is my skepticism about these highly technical, complex theories as well. I don't know enough to discount them based on technical merit, and they all certai

This is my skepticism about these highly technical, complex theories as well. I don't know enough to discount them based on technical merit, and they all certainly sound feasible, however unlikely. It's possible that the NSA can be tapping fibers, running its own fibers back to Utah, storing the data in a massive storage network, running millions of CPUs to decrypt it all, reverse-engineering the ever-changing application protocols, running very deep analysis against the results, and then coming up with the targets' communications patterns. It just seems much easier, cheaper, and faster for them to drop a secret, legal order on the involved companies and let the data come to them. It's the ultimate hack.