I agree. I think that if I was in possession of 11,000 accounts worth of NSA profiles I could definitely dig up something juicier.
What we are seeing here is the other side of the story. The tracking of valid terrorists, monitoring overseas nuclear projects and military events etc. I have no doubt that this article is a heavily redacted view of things but any criticism of reform of the NSA has to accept the need for these kind of actions.
Additionally, I hate how "the people" never hear about real intelligence that is of public concern (i.e. double-dealing by allies). What is the purpose of hiding this information from the public?
I suspect that both the government and media have disincentives for pushing out that kind of information. On the government side, you don't want to push out the fact that you're spying on them until the situation gets so big that it's worth potentially losing that source of information (e.g.: Iran/North Korea nuclear program, Chinese hackers, etc.) If your intelligence turns out to be bad, it could also backfire catastrophically (e.g.: Iraq WMDs).
On the media side, government intelligence successes aren't going to garner many eyeballs unless it's something huge. It would be similar to publishing a constant stream of minor military successes - if anything, they read more like propaganda. You're going to get a lot more readers by scaring the people into thinking that an Orwellian surveillance state has been constructed around them than telling them about something happening on the other side of the world that won't actually have much impact on the Average Joe's day-to-day life.
For the same reason, the government keeps falling back on terrorism as justification for spying since everyone was affected by 9-11 in one way or another instead of bringing up things like nuclear non-proliferation, trade agreements, intellectual property theft, etc.
What we are seeing here is the other side of the story. The tracking of valid terrorists, monitoring overseas nuclear projects and military events etc. I have no doubt that this article is a heavily redacted view of things but any criticism of reform of the NSA has to accept the need for these kind of actions.
Additionally, I hate how "the people" never hear about real intelligence that is of public concern (i.e. double-dealing by allies). What is the purpose of hiding this information from the public?