"Here's what now should be taken as an operating procedure in any discussion of the NSA..."

[quakerboy]

59. I propose that it works like this

The NSA secretes money. But instead of actually acting like a responsible spy agency, it acts like Rand Paul already took over, and hires a private company to do its work for twice the cost of directly hiring people to do the work for the government agency. A company such as Booz Allen Hamilton. Lets imagine, to make up a number out of thin air, that government spying contracts make up 49% of their corporate revenue of 5.8 billion annually. So 2.8 billion.

Now lets say that it actually costs Booz 1 billion to do the work it actually does, the equipment and pay for the actual workers. It would surprise me, because the fact that Snowden actually got inside their system would seem to indicate they are not really putting much of their cash into the work they are doing. It reeks of sloppiness. That leaves them 1.8 billion to take for the most important things, like extravagant salaries for the top management, bribe... I mean donate to politicians, and of course some profits.

In the scheme of that, 300k to hire a half dozen willing and ardent liberty university grads to troll the internets and propagandize the hell out of them to try and control or distract internet opinion trends to protect the gravy train from any incidental derailings is hardly even noticeable.