What if they just ran their calculations something like this?
Suppose a 10MB youtube video is watched 100x. That's 1GB traffic. The NSA could record the video (10MB), then simply record who watched it (maybe a few dozen MB in http headers, etc -- call it 40MB)
They could report they only monitored 50MB of 1,000 MB, or 5%.
If the video was watched 1,000x, they're "monitoring" around .5%. 10k views, they're monitoring .05%.
Pretty easy to see how they can report a true number that also doesn't reveal the extent of their wiretapping.
Suppose a 10MB youtube video is watched 100x. That's 1GB traffic. The NSA could record the video (10MB), then simply record who watched it (maybe a few dozen MB in http headers, etc -- call it 40MB)
They could report they only monitored 50MB of 1,000 MB, or 5%.
If the video was watched 1,000x, they're "monitoring" around .5%. 10k views, they're monitoring .05%.
Pretty easy to see how they can report a true number that also doesn't reveal the extent of their wiretapping.