Ah, yes, the "fuck it" approach to infosec.

Could be accurate but governments can be profoundly incompetent even with great capability at their disposal

"Watching" is doing heavy lifting. "Able to watch" or "being recorded, along with terabytes of parallel information from others", is more apt. Actually discriminating the signal (communications from a desired target, or about a desired topic) from noise is the problem with your "nothing you do will stop them" theory.