Incidentally, I love the mentality that says that the USG is using optical splitters to record all the traffic on the Internet, built a data center sufficient to archive it, built the database technology sufficient to enable the entire NSA and FBI realtime access to that data, compromised SSL CAs, but is too dumb not to tell strangers about their secret programs on random visits.
It's like in the movies, when the evil mastermind has the hero tied to a chair suspended over the laser shark tank, but monologues long enough for the hero to find a way to escape.
Apparently at least one FBI counterterrorism agent did this very thing, on national television. I think you are seriously underestimating FBI agents' big mouths.
> but is too dumb not to tell strangers about their secret programs on random visits.
The group of people that are doing this random visits are not imbued in the same culture of secrecy as the NSA. Furthermore, the larger a program, the more and more casual a group of people are going to be about protecting it. It's the fault of our social programming -- if nearly everyone I deal with on a daily basis is in on a secret, I am far more likely to share that secret. This is probably the reason that nobody talks about their own secret projects at the NSA.
Your line of reasoning was what I used to assume about the type of NSA style data collection: "Gathering and using data information about every American would be an immense task, requiring lots of people -- if such a program existed, we probably would have found out about it now."
It turns out -- we are finding out about it for precisely that reason.
You're picturing the organization as a single mind and mentality when it's composed of many thousands of people with many motivations and levels of competence. The agents on the ground aren't the same as those who build the fancy technology (and in this case the agents who visited the author of the blog post were from a completely different organization).
This is how spying works in general--find one of the inevitably many people in a secret organization who will, in the right compromised situation (alcohol, a romantic affair, etc.), brag about their knowledge of state secrets.
Or look at Bradley Manning, who among other things exposed the fact that low level operatives have access to far more secret data than one would have imagined. His motivation (which led him to release all the data) differed from the organization's overall motivation in an extreme way.
I love the mentality that says that the USG is [doing complicated technical things], but is too dumb not to tell strangers about their secret programs on random visits.
That's not a mentality, that's being aware the USG consists of millions of people, exactly the opposite of
It's like in the movies, when the evil mastermind has the hero tied to a chair
Thomas, the sane HN readers have stopped venturing into the NSA threads. You've made a valiant effort, and its charitable of you to keep the truthers distracted from attacking other threads, but it's time to leave them behind.
The cops in question were apparently local members of a Joint Terrorism Task Force. They get these tips from "the government", check them out, the people are once again not terrorists, and they then talk to them freely like normal people, because (1) they are and (2) the cops aren't NSA, don't have training in this kind of secrecy and don't care, and (3) do pretty well by classifying people into sheep and goats without worrying that some of the sheep might be cleverly disguised goats or have goat friends.
So yeah, this part of the story is entirely plausible to me.
Not to pick on you, but this meme is so grating to read over and over. "Government is incompetent" is an easy, lazy narrative that distracts from the immense complexity that is government (especially the US government).
Government is neither competent nor incompetent. It is a vast collection of organizations composed of humans that vary from grossly negligent paycheck collectors to shockingly effective strategic geniuses. Bureaucracy is the friction inherent in the system; different people clog and lubricate its workings to different aims, which range from the purest altruism to the most cynical abuse.
A government may be incompetent in solving issues in the interest of their constituents, but these people are cream-of-the-crop professionals at accumulating power.
