To make some sense of the size of the online communications data intercepted and hoarded by the NSA, CUNY journalism professor Jeff Jarvi ran some "beer-soaked-napkin numbers" for the Guardian.

The upshot: the agency says it only "touches" 1.6 percent of daily Internet traffic. According to Jarvis' loose calculations, however, that's a pretty whopping "only" -- 1.6 percent of daily traffic equates to something like "400 Googles" and "126 Facebooks" worth of data.

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As Jarvis notes: