&gt; they either have permission (e.g. companies have agreed to hand over the encryption keys or allow monitoring of the data after it is unencrypted on arrival)<p>No, because nobody would do that and the NSA has no legal authority with which to force that. Companies wouldn&#x27;t agree to this because they have everything to lose and nothing to gain. It&#x27;s not like the NSA could even offer them favors in exchange, as the entire thing is ultra-classified. Also there&#x27;s exactly zero chance this would ever be able to be kept secret. Companies can&#x27;t even keep their products secret for the few months it takes from prototypes to launch, there&#x27;s no way in hell the NSA would trust them to keep this secret for years. The first sys admin forced to do this would <i>instantly</i> talk about it.<p>&gt; some other means (man-in-the-middle attacks, server backdoors, hacking vulnerable software) to bypass the encryption entirely<p>The article talks about this. That&#x27;s definitely possible, but it&#x27;s much more targetted and doesn&#x27;t fit the scale that the Snowden leaks suggested the NSA was achieving.