They had to jump through a lot of hoops for the FOIA stuff, they said it in the movie. Yes we can do that, But they already have for us. Now we can take the data that they sorted through, and use it instead of us needing to sort through the petabytes of ping data.
This place has an army...,they were limited by resources.
Anyone can purchase the ping information and do a FOIA request
They had to jump through a lot of hoops for the FOIA stuff, they said it in the movie. Yes we can do that, But they already have for us. Now we can take the data that they sorted through, and use it instead of us needing to sort through the petabytes of ping data.