Ask HN: Why would government security and hacking be any good?

Everywhere else in government, IT systems are generally bad, or old, or underfunded, or outsourced to some foreign services company.

Making anything happen is slow, political, time consuming, expensive and has a reasonable chance of failing.

Why is it that anyone feels that government hacking, surveillance and spying would be anything better?

Fear the NSA? You've got to be joking. In five years they won't even know what systems they have, let alone how to retrieve meaningful information from the flood of data they never knew how to get on top of in the first place.

Why do we fear government spying? We should be laughing out loud at the idea that our government could do anything so clever in and organized and competent manner over the long run.