Let me be more clear. The part that requires competence is everything up to the leak. Given the scope, keeping this quiet is no small task. It isn't just keeping the people who know about this from talking. It is also preventing other people from finding out. Depending the way they theoretically got this data, that could stretch from keeping this hidden directly in the code base at Facebook to hiding huge amounts of traffic emanating from Facebook's data centers. Remember a lot of these tech companies helped recognize and locate likely Chinese sponsored government hackers in the past. If someone is doing something they aren't supposed to, a lot of people are going to find out about it.

The part that requires incompetence is everything that has happened today. The NSA's job is intelligence. They are the experts in connecting dots, reading between the lines, seeing how random events might be a sign of something bigger, and whatever other cliches you want to throw in here. Yet they are an organization that doesn't know that having people reading from nearly identical scripts will make people think they are reading from nearly identically scripts?

It's not difficult to keep something quiet when the consequences are that you violate national security and go to prison.

Senator Wyden has openly talked about how he wanted to say something about these programs, and even now he can't reveal details of what's going on because it would violate national security and he'd probably be put in prison or at the least removed from Congress.

The overall fact that the NSA has been reading our email, tracking us on Facebook, tapping our phones, etc. has not been kept quiet. Exact details are far more difficult to come by, even now those are classified. The IRS was talking about their right to read our email four years ago. The IRS has no known infrastructure to pull that off, it's clear they were talking about NSA or FBI programs.

As someone else noted, the government is very frequently both competent and incompetent when performing tasks or running programs. There's nothing unusual about that, you see it throughout the government bureaucracy. Sometimes they pull off impressive feats that you only read about decades later, and other times they're Nixon trying to cover up Watergate.

  | The IRS was talking about their right to read our
  | email four years ago. The IRS has no known
  | infrastructure to pull that off, it's clear they
  | were talking about NSA or FBI programs.

I seem to remember that this was about their ability to just walk up to Google and request someone's emails without a warrant of any sort. There's no implication that it has to be related to some NSA or FBI program. Assuming that the NSA has every email ever written in storage, I doubt that they would coordinate with something as 'mundane' as IRS tax collection. They are a spy agency after all, and their purview is National Security.

>Senator Wyden has openly talked about how he wanted to say something about these programs, and even now he can't reveal details of what's going on because it would violate national security and he'd probably be put in prison or at the least removed from Congress.

Which is complete bullshit of course. Mike Gravel anyone?

> Given the scope, keeping this quiet is no small task.

Rumors of widespread data collection -- even specifically by the NSA -- from many of the providers at issue have surfaced many times, what was new recently is the same (or substantially similar) bits of documentary evidence substantiating and connecting those rumors.

So, to all appearances, it may not really have been "kept quiet" up until the recent leak, it was just that the information that got out before wasn't as well-supported and therefore hard to dismiss.

That implies the same people who architected this are responsible for the damage control... highly doubtful. The press releases & language reeks of one thing... Lawyers.