The intelligence agencies are tree-shaped management hierarchies like any other, and those produce an incentive for managers to inflate the scope of their work, so they can get more headcount, so they can look more impressive when trying to be promoted further up the hierarchy. So there’s definitely an incentive to pretend we’re relevant enough to have dedicated people monitoring.

Also being half outside the US means doesn’t mean we’re less relevant, it means both the FBI and CIA have a chance to pretend we are.