Agreed, but we still think of the CIA and NSA on a technical level as being capable of unparalleled surveillance, crypto cracking, and other general hackery and engineering to maintain its power. Perhaps that's part of the propaganda. With that said, I imagine much of that is possible with backdoors to mass consumer data like Facebook which is actually collected via ingenious (but unethical) talent in Silicon Valley.

I learned from Snowden's book that the real way to make money working for the government is to quit and become a contractor.