Because the NSA has absolutely nothing to do with sneak and peak. They don't even have field agents as far as I am aware. They strictly consist of mathematicians and computer scientists and their missions are to collect and analyze traffic patterns, break encryption of adversaries, design encryption for the government that cannot be broken, protect the American cyber infrastructure from attack and attack the cyber infrastructure of targets for intelligence and possibly warfare purposes. Intelligence Agencies: NSA, CIA Federal Police Agencies: ICE, FBI, DEA, IRS State Police Agencies: New York State Police, California Highway Patrol Local Police Agencies: LAPD, NYPD These agencies have different sorts of targets and different levels of skill and different legal permissions. Local police agencies mostly deal with things like drunk drivers, domestic abuse, shoplifting, petty drug crimes, small time CP offenders etc. They are also a first layer of response to things like 911 calls, so if somebody shoots someone or something they will be the ones to respond to a 911 call and make an arrest or initial search for the perpetrator. State police deal with mostly the same things but they have wider jurisdiction and might handle more complex investigations (though apparently the extent of what the state police do varies significantly from state to state). State and local police are more responsive than proactive. Federal police agencies have jurisdiction over the entire USA and they are much more specialized as compared to local and state police, for example the DEA enforces federal drug law, ICE enforces custom and immigration law, the IRS enforces tax law, the FBI is a general investigatory agency though they also are specialized in various things including but not limited to cyber investigations, counter terrorism, mafia investigations and serial killer investigations. The federal police generally do not bother small time offenders, they leave them for the local and state police agencies. They focus some on mid level offenders and primarily on the biggest offenders. If they are involved in going after a small time offender, it will be in a minimal support role for the state or local police. The intelligence agencies are on a completely different level. The NSA is tasked with the electronic forms of espionage that I already mentioned. The CIA is involved primarily in human intelligence, infiltrating foreign governments with moles as well as turning the agents of foreign governments to the USA. They are also involved in covert operations and a wide variety of other things, but predominately they are a human intelligence agency. There are other intelligence agencies specialized in creating signatures of events and then measuring variables trying to detect them (for example creating a signature of what a certain type of missile sounds like and then creating systems that can detect when those missiles are launched). There are a ton of different intelligence agencies and they are all extremely specialized in what they do and none of them are tasked with targeting criminals, they are not police agencies most of them are either military agencies (such as the NSA) or in a specialized class of their own (such as the CIA). The FBI is a bit of a mix between a police agency and an intelligence agency though. They have criminal investigators but they also have investigators who specialize in counter intelligence (detecting spies in the USA) and counter terrorism. The FBI can be considered as a hybrid police intelligence agency, and they certainly scare me a lot more than the NSA does.