I'm gonna call bullshit based on the story by Snowden in his biography about his Boomer co-worker who was in charge of maintaining a tape drive that recorded all incoming communications from field agents as a backup
I mean, there's a difference between a reel of AMPEX film that the NSA is dragging their feet on digitizing, and the modern 45TB 8gbps tape cartridges that absolutely could be used to store thousands of hours of video per day.
It's more modern than what's being talked about in the article. Snowden knew his stuff, that doesn't mean he knew what the old guy with the tape was doing tech wise.