The parent comment is not suggesting that they are the gatekeepers of the data, but rather that they act as a third party to authenticate data transmission. For

The parent comment is not suggesting that they are the gatekeepers of the data, but rather that they act as a third party to authenticate data transmission. For example, company X says it wants to get you data, pass it through service Y and return Z, with the claim that the sensitive parts be secure. The role of the NSA would be to provide an audit of this process to determine whether or not security was in place. So if a service passed this hypothetical NSAs test they would actually never see any private information. The only danger is that the NSA withhold information about known insecurities, but that isn't any different from the current situation, and does not amount to "gatekeeping".