Do you think the NSA is shadier than the KGB? What about the Iranian Revolutionary Guard? Or even the CIA?
I know people are upset about the Snowden revelations but there are much graver sins that have been committed by other agencies.
Anyways, plenty of countries have security agencies whose main job is to violently protect the local kleptocrats these days. China might be a better example to point to for even worse behavior, with their balkanized net and mass surveillance being used to carry out the mass internment and repression of ethnic minorities in regions like Xinjiang.
The Russians have definitely gone back to the old ways, I'm not sure the distinction between the old and new matters much any more (The GRU is the same organization, the FSB still reside in the Lubyanka - "the tallest building in Moscow")
it actually does [0] - at least in belarus and some of the russian-occupied pseudo-republics
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Security_Committee_of_th...
https://theintercept.com/2017/07/20/cameroonian-troops-tortu...
EDIT: Don't forget that NSA acquires data to create actionable intelligence that can be passed onto another actor. Whatever you think about them, their work is being used in many cases ultimately by another agency or government.
You're right about the detail (probably) and also very wrong to be focusing on that particular detail instead of interpreting it as just barely mild hyperbole.
You've gone to "it's not the absolute worst, therefore I dismiss the statement" instead of "it's not the absolute worst, but it's still really fucking bad so I'm going to recognize the premise and move on".
If I tried to justify the NSA's behavior _because_ of what the GRU/IRA/CIA does, that is whataboutism. Hope this was a bit helpful.
It's not whataboutism if the claim is making a comparison against all other possibilities. "shadiest government agency on the planet" may be an objectively false statement as applied to the NSA. You can compare the NSA to other contenders for "most shady" using any number of metrics and create an ordered list. None of that is whataboutism.