the CIA intercepts 2 million messages PER HOUR. None of that is organized in nice, neat easy-to-understand format. Not only that, but much of the traffic is in foreign languages. According to the news piece, for all of the langauges spoken in Afghanistan, the CIA had only 6 people as translators. The backlog for translating the messages was months long.

The real world is a messy place. People who're planning on doing dirty deads go out of their way to keep their plans secret. Some people seem to live in a "Enemy of the State" fantasy world where outfits like the NSA and CIA can instantly receive messages for anywhere on Earth and know everything everyone is doing. Once again, the real world is far different from the Hollywood fantasy. When the dots are coming in at 2 million an hour, it's damned hard just to keep up much less make the necessary connections to determine what is going on.