> I'm not saying it wasn't a hack, but I have a hard time when people, especially on HN, still believe the government / large groups of people can do successful

> I'm not saying it wasn't a hack, but I have a hard time when people, especially on HN, still believe the government / large groups of people can do successful, massive cover-ups after Snowden's revelations. That's a fairly naive take. There are hundreds of thousands people (more?) working on classified programs to spy on citizens. The fact that leaks are so extremely rare that a Snowden is a once-in-a-generation type of event is plenty of evidence that very large groups of people do very successfully maintain massive cover-ups nearly 100% of the time.