Is that the same incompetent, corruptible, mistake-prone, wasteful, malevolent government that, when it comes to national security, is suddenly competent, non-corruptible, unmistakable, benevolent?
You're confusing the political cesspool with the national defense establishment, Slobodan. One problem we run into more and more often as time goes by is the problem posed by politicians without any military or national defense experience trying to make national defense decisions that are way outside their area of expertise. Fifty years ago the draft ensured that a majority of the people in our government understood first-hand what war is all about. Now they've been replaced by the sixties crowd.
When it comes to economics, our politicians have demonstrated again and again that they're incompetent, corruptible, mistake-prone, wasteful, and sometimes malevolent. But they've pretty much left defense to specialists. 9/11 resulted from one of the times when ignorant politicians intervened -- incompetently as we now realize.
There are flakes in every group of people, and the fact that Snowden even was hired demonstrates that not everybody in the NSA is competent. But on balance the military and our intelligence outfits are busting their butts to save yours, Slobodan.
Here's a thought: Most of the functions of the NSA necessarily are secret. But there's no reason why this kind of communications analysis needs to be secret. There's nothing illegal or threatening about having a computer track telephone connections, and there's no reason why this operation shouldn't have been set up somewhere outside the NSA. I'm sure every intelligence agency in the world was thoroughly aware that it existed and knew how it worked -- long before Snowden "revealed" it. Considering the easy availability of super computers I'd also be willing to bet that every even moderately advanced country out there has a similar program, and I'm sure they'd all be happy to tell our stupid "media" that they're "shocked. . . shocked" that ours exists.