[maximente]

i would wager a fair amount of US dollars that, given past behavior/track record, the offensive mission of NSA would almost certainly result in some sort of backdoor that would eventually be used by opposing actors to pull down the data directly.

the defensive NSA guys would probably be blamed post-facto in some sort of delicious intra-organizational bull-bleep.

[atonse]

That's a different argument. I'm addressing this notion that the government is oh so incompetent and the only people that can do this is the private sector, when many countries have upgraded to excellent government-run (but private sector built) payment systems that work just fine.