You have to put yourself in the mindset of people who think big, are completely amoral and money is no object. A couple examples:

There's encryption in use the NSA can't crack (SSL). So they..record the entire internet because someday they may be able to crack it. Sounds impossible, but they do. I don't know how many racks in how many data centers it takes, but money is no object.

Create an entire war on drugs to..keep a few percent of the black population from voting. Sounds like evil on a scale that's impossible to believe.

I'm sure your a decent person, which is why you discount how evil evil can get.