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.

Which is complete bullshit of course. Mike Gravel anyone?

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.