Thank you for acknowledging that it is fathomable that NSA has Google Mail's keymatter, and that if they do, it would be one of the most closely guarded secrets in the agency, something they would burn other programs, and make other cover stories, to obscure.

The term "direct access" may have been fuzzy speak, and indicative of an "impedance mismatch" between what different concentric layers of the NSA knows. The author of the PRISM deck understood it to be "direct access" based on what he'd been told, and the low-lag operation he'd seen. But perhaps that was still be FISA-order based, just really fast: an analyst flags a name at their terminal. The name is forwarded the Google and the FISA court. Google does its "review" but knows a request of exactly this specific form always wins -- they don't get to challenge the reasons for the request, which they don't even see. Now it's 'reviewed', the SFTP dumps begin... but they aren't one-time, but perhaps daily... or even hourly or faster... to keep up with the target's ongoing mail activity. (They didn't go through the trouble of using one of their thousands of requests just to get old activity, did they?) To the PRISM deck authors, that still feels like "direct access" – and colloquially, it is.

But given compartmentalization within the NSA, what if some of the data is arriving via another, deeper capability? The PRISM deck author, the average analyst may just think it's from the other process. It's not their business to know more; the rows/records appear in their tool, and they get on with their work, happy for the bounty of info from other 'acquisition' programs which sometimes (often!) work in mysterious ways.