i will just say that if you're in the business of smuggling drugs and are dumb enough not to use secure communication channels, you deserve to be caught.
keeping that in mind, the only ones who end up in the dragnet are small-time stupid smugglers and your average innocent citizen. the value of the former at the expense of the latter is likely inconsequential.
Back in the day with the Nextel phones and service the two way walkie talkie bit use to be impossible to monitor. The FBI made them basically break the security on it. Then right inside their data center they had a rack of their equipment. For engineers there was no drama in listening in to any phone call (press a button basically). Now that all this has come out, I would not be the least bit surprised if the FBI just pressed that button without a warrant. They definitely didn't need physical access.
Interesting point that the NSA spends billions of dollars, if not trillions of dollars, along with some of the most sophisticated technology on the planet to catch b-level smugglers and criminals.
Quite often NSA spends billions because it already spends billions.
Contractors, infrastructure, PR, salaries, promotions, training. That has been put into place.
Well it was there to spy on the Soviets. Then it was kind of sitting there waiting for a problem. And the problem was found. Terrorism. Drugs. Could be something else tomorrow. As long as Joe Smith in SIGINT department 15 gets his salary paid, he doesn't care. As long as L3 or whoever gets to build another data center they don't care. They will all collectively find some reason to justify it, but underneath, quite often is just making more money keeping busy.
They made the mistake though (mistake from their point of view), that one of the characteristics they look for in people they hire is patriotism. That can very very dangerous if eventually those people are forced to do un-patriotic things (or things they can't brainwash them into thinking they are patriotic). You end up with Binney and Snowden then.
Usually not. They jump from gov to private and back.
This happens with other agencies as well. FDA is full of future and past heads from agro-businesses and pharma companies. FCC is full of people from cable and satellite companies and so on.
This is capitalism at work. Achieve success by whatever means possible. The easiest means is the get in the position to re-write rules and police yourself.
Some people conflate blind faith and patriotism. I am pretty sure that what they really wanted was the former.
All organisms want to survive (political, economic, etc). Now if the NSA could just deem cancer a threat to the national security of the country then they could put their super computer power to good use.
keeping that in mind, the only ones who end up in the dragnet are small-time stupid smugglers and your average innocent citizen. the value of the former at the expense of the latter is likely inconsequential.