The larger the conspiracy theory is, the higher the risk that someone will simply decide it's worth whistleblowing on. The whistleblowing could even be effecti

The larger the conspiracy theory is, the higher the risk that someone will simply decide it's worth whistleblowing on. The whistleblowing could even be effectively done anonymously in this case. Secret Government surveillance of end to end encrypted data in the US would be such a huge news story and public interest that it wouldn't be difficult to find engineers willing to take the risk of anonymously providing evidence of it to the press. A "few hundred" gag orders placed on engineers about something deeply outrageous sounds completely implausible as lasting secrecy. Secrets simply can't be kept at that scale. Even NSA employees themselves would eventually refuse to keep such a program secret, as we saw with Snowden.