[AnabeeKnox]

"It's fairly established the NSA has everything tapped and collecting/storing all traffic."

That's nonsense though. Even a basic understanding of internet technology would show that such a thing is impossible.

[cronix]

Hmm. People who built it, or in charge of building it, seem to disagree.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3owk7vEEOvs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjwW1JlGG4o

And I'm sure you've read Snowdens revelations, and lack of denials from the intelligence community, and Binney and Drake, among others, confirming, and what the gov't did to try to silence them.

[strictnein]

No NSA program has ever been "collecting/storing all traffic". Please, I understand you think there is one, but just start to think about the bandwidth and storage needed to do something like that. You're talking about Zettabytes worth of data each and every day. Just insane levels of data.

Binney and Drake were upset because their Thinthread project was passed over and a much more advanced and expensive project was chosen (that later failed miserably).

Hayden directly refutes them in his book "Playing to the Edge". I'm sure you won't take his statements as anything, but you said there was a "lack of denial" from the intelligence community, and his book is full of them.

[pmlnr]

Do some math, nobody can build storage fast enough to storage everything flowing through the internet.