I can see the attractiveness of doing malware & spam scanning "on the wire" -- but I fail to see what the NSA can bring to the party that cannot already be provided by commercial antivirus/antimalware companies?
Cyber "defense"? What a joke. NSA's cyber/hacking programs and the US Cyber Command of which it's in charge of, have always been about offense, and they will continue to be for the most part. NSA is all about finding exploits and exploiting them, not patching them up.
The idea that NSA could "protect" the Internet by having complete access to it is a very flawed one, but I'm sure it could be something NSA could believe strongly: "Just give us more billions of dollars - we're the only ones who can fix the Internet".
