I've been trying to grok the data coming out of the NSA yesterday and could use everyone's thoughts. I am by no means sold on my approach, but I've definitely put thought into it.

Feel free to critique / destroy / inform.

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.

It's affiliates..

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:

"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."

"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."

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.

[1] http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Endgame_Systems