Deciphering the doublespeak is tough. "Touches" implies, at least to me, data that passes through hardware controlled one way or another by the NSA or it's corporate affiliates.<p>It's affiliates..<p>That brings me to "The reality is the NSA has no physical ability to touch 1/4 of the basketball court." As we know the NSA hires corporations like Booz Allen, another such corporate entity is Endgame Systems[1]. In terms of courts Endgame dabbles in collections and offensive operations that cover the entire court:<p>"There are even target packs for democratic countries in Europe and other U.S. allies. Maui (product names tend toward alluring warm-weather locales) is a package of 25 zero-day exploits that runs clients $2.5 million a year."<p>"The Cayman botnet-analytics package gets you access to a database of Internet addresses, organization names, and worm types for hundreds of millions of infected computers, and costs $1.5 million."<p>The use of malware, most probably the very malware others are prosecuted for, gives the NSA a limited but as cgshaw noted valuable foothold into otherwise dark neighborhoods of the net.<p>[1] <a href="http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Endgame_Systems" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Endgame_Systems</a>