But why would they bother. The point of collecting data for surveillance is to provide signals that help sort the real threats from the noise. But the Nieman Foundation is such a well-known and widely-read blog that just reading an article there is not at all noteworthy, regardless of the subject.

Most government employees are not even in a position to access leakable data even they wanted to. Targeting them based on reading an article would be a waste of effort.