I guess my point was that if they only use it 300 times, is it really worth having the program around given the combo of costs both in privacy and dollars?
Of course there is more at play here, but they should be selling how many terrorist attacks they avoided, now how many people they snooped.
It's not that the NSA's entire mission has boiled down to monitoring 300 phone numbers worldwide.
What is being stated is that "[l]ast year, fewer than 300 phone numbers were checked against the database of millions of U.S. phone records gathered daily by the NSA". (http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2021199412_nsatechd...)