This is the politics of fear at work. Have a supposedly loose cannon rogue agent “release” it into the wild. Now everyone’s looking over their shoulder. They do this very thing in North Korea to let everyone know they’re being watched.
When my late father retired from the Marine Corps as a communications chief, he went to work at the phone company, tapping lines so the government could listen in. That was in the 1960’s. It was not a new thing.