It is prudent to be skeptical about any claims from the government, especially those about their capabilities. Scooping up the databases from private companies, for example, is something government can do quite easily. Sorting it into anything useful is quite another. The volume is just too vast. Plus, a security apparatus so good that they can scoop and read everyone’s e-mail is not getting bested by a high school drop out like Snowden.

The reality is probably something a bit more crude. This story the other day in the Washington Post is what I mean.

The U.S. government threatened to fine Yahoo $250,000 a day in 2008 if it failed to comply with a broad demand to hand over user communications — a request the company believed was unconstitutional — according to court documents unsealed Thursday that illuminate how federal officials forced American tech companies to participate in the National Security Agency’s controversial PRISM program.

The documents, roughly 1,500 pages worth, outline a secret and ultimately unsuccessful legal battle by Yahoo to resist the government’s demands. The company’s loss required Yahoo to become one of the first to begin providing information to PRISM, a program that gave the NSA extensive access to records of online com­munications by users of Yahoo and other U.S.-based technology firms.

The ruling by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review became a key moment in the development of PRISM, helping government officials to convince other Silicon Valley companies that unprecedented data demands had been tested in the courts and found constitutionally sound. Eventually, most major U.S. tech companies, including Google, Facebook, Apple and AOL, complied. Microsoft had joined earlier, before the ruling, NSA documents have shown.

Rather than covertly tapping into the root servers of the Internet or sniffing the world’s firewalls, the Feds are busting down doors and telling the big players to hand over their data. No doubt it is coming over in a digital format and in bulk, but that’s like having tractor trailers full of letters to Santa showing up ever day. Finding the one letter from Mohamed in Detroit is not going to be easy and maybe not even possible. Without a lot of other intelligence, having a big pile of e-mails is a waste of resources.

But, there’s value in letting the world know you can read their e-mail and listen to their calls. Even if it is not entirely true, it tilts the playing field. It forces everyone else to take precautions they otherwise might not take and maybe pushed them into forms of communication that are easier to track. The e-mail and telephone data also has use if you have other intel. If Abdul comes up on the radar and you have Abdul’s cell data, you can begin to put together his circle of friends, as it were.

Still it is important to remember that they have not caught anyone with this data. The Feds run to the nearest TV camera every time they catch some dope trying to join Jihad. If they had something to justify what is a very unpopular program, they would have made it public. It’s like gun registration. It is only useful when you have a lot of other information about the crime. In the case of gun crimes, the registration is useful after you have the gun and the perp. In the case of terrorism, having cell phone data is useful after you have the perp’s identity and location.