No, that would be a sign that they were incompetent, because secretly communicating groups do use unusual chats, such as graphical children's chat applets, in-game communications, shoutboxes and such. Why wouldn't they?
I don't know, game chat systems seem like a pretty good place to conspire. Imagine something like Call of Duty, you can pretty obviously talk about attacks and targets without setting off any red flags since it would be indistinguishable from real game chat.
Or they're pretending to be incompetent so they have an excuse to swallow up World of Warcraft and Yahoo Messenger chat logs. Because they don't care about terrorists, they care about logging /everything/. It's about power.
Its not.
It is creating one.
That is why its imperative that we do something about the NSA.
And completely legal (from their perspective), whereas attacking foreign citizens gets into grey areas.
The NSA could, for example, compromise Comcast routers, use this bug to MITM every single SSL connection to e-mail servers, and collect literally millions of people's credentials and messages.
The cost of doing the equivalent with "break my jaw" techniques is astronomical. You'd need massive manpower, huge facilities, and of course the public backlash would be almost incomprehensibly vast.
Programmers of all people should be able to understand that an automated, computerized solution can be applied to a large scale extremely cheaply, and that this is pretty much the only way to scale up to millions of users. In the NSA's case, it's targets instead of users, but the same principle applies.
The NSA wants all of the data. Technological measures is how to obtain it, and that's what they've been doing.
If this is an intentional bug, I think it's likely a hacker or just a disgruntled employee. But I'd be willing to wager that it was a tiredness error, rushed to implementation by an overworked and likely underpaid engineer deep within Apple.