Interestingly, the article explicitly mentions the FBI, not the NSA. But, if we were to unify them in our respective imaginations (for the purposes of discussion), they still need to have the budget for their operations supplied from somewhere. http://www.fbi.gov/news/testimony/fbi-budget-request-for-fis... - it appears as if the FBI's budget is just as rigidly controlled as any other governmental organisation. How they internally allocate the funding they receive is a different matter. To me it seems that if there is any form of oversight within the FBI, then the funding of a project of this cost/return ratio would be infeasible and therefore the project could possibly be shut down. There is the possibility that this is an exercise in propaganda and scare tactics: "We can read your emails, so don't try anything. Check out our power". However, because the internal mechanics of the FBI are necessarily not public knowledge this is all speculation and unsubstantiated opinion. But, the argument can be made that this very fact enables the FBI to get away with scare tactics. I still don't see an organisation with the real-world constraints of money being able to store the sheer volume of data that they claim to. For arguments sake, let's assume that the year-on-year rate of email generation remains uniform for the next decade. In one year, they need to have the ability to store X amount of emails. In a decade, they'll need 10X amount of storage. How are they going to store all that data?