As I assume tptacek would also say, the specifics of the "direct access" are rather a big deal. If the access is constrained to NSLs approved by judges in regul

As I assume tptacek would also say, the specifics of the "direct access" are rather a big deal. If the access is constrained to NSLs approved by judges in regulated quantity, you have a legal process. Perhaps there is no independent oversight or accountability to the public at large, yet you still have legality. However, if any analyst can at whim look at the info associated with any gmail account / Facebook user / etc. then you have a clearly extra-legal approach with absolutely no accountability. Also, there is a significant difference between capacity and use. If a analyst or a sys admin for the NSA has capacity to view things but does not actually have permission from the NSA to use that capability absent an NSL, then To be honest, to date nothing has emerged that makes it seem that the NSA has this sort of capacity, except when it comes to Verizon phone calls, although I don't think we know much if anything about the NSA's downstream capabilities when it comes to major Silicon Valley firms. In short, I assume that Google, Facebook, etc. are telling an important truth when they say that access is limited to legal processes. Whether or not the NSA also has and uses downstream access to similar data is another question altogether.