I don't think that a counter-argument. If we rephrase it as: no entity thus far has a good grasp on the current state of the world at any given moment and furth

I don't think that a counter-argument. If we rephrase it as: no entity thus far has a good grasp on the current state of the world at any given moment and furthermore, no one or group can really predict the effect of their actions on the world state, to speak of predicting the future more generally, it becomes clearer that neither the NSA nor think tanks are specially advantaged. The more correlated the world becomes (the more quickly information propagates) the harder this becomes to do. What the spying and surveillance does is to allow Just In Time flagging at best, spying on a specific target, or as an investigative tool once an event has already occurred. But to use the information to predict what might occur (which is important for effective scheming) has not proven to be possible. Knowing which is signal amongst the noise is extremely difficult. If https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Judgment_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Judgment_Project is to be believed, access to classified information does not make one anymore capable than someone with an intuitive grasp of base rates, properly updates to new information and an Internet connection.