[blauwbilgorgel]

I'd like to focus on:

Merely searching the web for the privacy-enhancing software tools outlined in the XKeyscore rules causes the NSA to mark and track the IP address of the person doing the search.

Again the media makes it sound like there exists a dragnet on (Google) searches. But this time one of the authors is J. Appelbaum.

So which is it? Terrorist Scores based on search engine searches sounds fantastically insane to me. But unencrypted it is possible to intercept. So perhaps it is something in between: All accessible searches are monitored, and search engines do not cooperate with this directly, unless they have to legally comply with the request?

[nostrademons]

One of the earlier Snowden disclosures was that the NSA had tapped private internal Google fiber lines carrying traffic between data centers. Same with Yahoo, Microsoft, other major Internet destinations. Google has since started encrypting all internal traffic, but for awhile pretty much anything was available to the NSA dragnet.

[alex_duf]

I'm sure it still is. We just don't know how yet, but a giant corporation like google has probably other ways to be attacked.

And if it is not possible on the technical level, the NSA will find the people to access the data they want.