I think you're overestimating the difficulty of the problem. The difficult part is access to the channels of information. After that, it's a matter of applying well-known algorithms while filtering and processing streams.
The only reason that I suspect that the government is still terrible at this is because they have to rely on government contractors to implement it. If they're intentionally funding startups that happen to be developing tools in the spaces they need, though, it's only a matter of a (short) time until the systems they have are settled and dependable, and they can concentrate on innovation.
>it's the NSA that is behaving out of line. So they should change, not you.
This is also silly. That's like people who walk into speeding traffic because they have the right-of-way. You won't get to hear about how the trial turns out from your grave.
