However unlikely, it's still possible the NSA had moles or secret legal proceedings against certain employees that directed them to provide the NSA with a direct connection to the servers.
The reason why I say 'unlikely' is that such a setup would also involve data connectivity out of those data centers and additionally would probably trip all sorts of intrusion monitoring systems (if the big companies are doing their jobs right).
There's still a little wiggle room here, just not much very realistically.
However unlikely, it's still possible the NSA had moles or secret legal proceedings against certain employees that directed them to provide the NSA with a direct connection to the servers.
The reason why I say 'unlikely' is that such a setup would also involve data connectivity out of those data centers and additionally would probably trip all sorts of intrusion monitoring systems (if the big companies are doing their jobs right).
There's still a little wiggle room here, just not much very realistically.