Snowden says that he had "the authorities" to wiretap anyone -- even the President.

[DisgustipatedinCA]

129. Encryption is an entirely different matter, and out of scope

Fwiw, I think NSA can break SSL, but not in real-time. I'm assuming court orders come in handy in those cases.

What you're calling a tap takes the form of a switchport in today's infrastructure. No matter what kind of digital circuit you have, it's not at all difficult to logically associate another port with it, such that the second port can get a copy. This can be done on your point to point link, your MetroE link, serial links, frame relay, whatever. There do not exist any telco circuits that consist solely of a wire from one place to another. All circuits go through a variety of layer 2 and/or 3 devices, and where that happens, copies can be obtained, constrained only by the physical limitations of the router or switch. From that ointment, the NSA or whomever is vacuuming the data can just send it to storage, across the wire, locally, whatever. Presumably they also have advanced search, playback, and pattern matching software that makes the high volume of data more manageable.

As to the NSA's capacity, none of us knows. But we all do know about the mega data center in Utah. Someone will probably be able to extrapolate good guesses if they can figure out approximately how much power they're using. I do know that the NSA doesn't give a tinker's damn about how many 10GigE circuits they have to pay for on a monthly recurring basis. They've got tons of budget to work with. I don't know what capacity they're at now, but there's no real theoretical limit to how much capacity they can build.