This is my belief as well. A few years ago I worked for a company that sold packet capture appliances to unnamed government agencies. The higher end appliances were capable of 10Gb/s packet to disk streaming. I helped write a search interface for the resulting data capable of the type of filtering and data reconstruction described. If organizations directly, indirectly, knowingly or unknowingly allowed the NSA to tap Internet links, they could theoretically provide full data access, while at the same time publicly deny direct server or backdoor access.