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I think they are probably replicating their content in realtime onto government servers, so technically Google et al don't give the NSA any "direct" server access. In practice it's way more convenient to house all that data directly under the NSA/DHS/whatever umbrella than to connect to Google every time they need something.

Using piecemeal "direct access" would also hurt the government's data mining ambitions, so there are a lot of factors that suggest internet companies are simply obligated to stream all their data into a gov black box. This way, everybody wins: the government gets warrant-less, hassle-free access to absolutely everything, the internet companies get freedom from search warrants and NSLs, and they get to use the canned "direct access" denial line which is technically true but is still actually a huge lie.




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