I am reminded for an episode of The Simpsons in which Bart changes his grade from 'F' to an 'A+'.
Homer: [incredulously] A-plus?!? You don't think much of me, do you boy?
Bart: [almost proudly] No sir!
Homer: You know a D turns into a B so easily. You just got greedy.
300 phone numbers is a such low number it is completely unbelievable. I would expect a intelligence agency would be better at telling convincing lies, but I guess they don't think much of us. For future reference I might believe somewhere in the range of 15,000 to 50 million. Also 300 is a surprisingly round number.
Obviously not the OP but I would give a definite yes to the second question, esp. considering what qualifies as a "terrorist" these days.
Let's take the Boston Bombers and make a low balling guess that each one of them has called 20 unique numbers in the last 6 month, each of which have in turn again called 20 unique numbers and we are already at 800 numbers under surveillance.
NSA does drug busts, industrial espionage, and political work for many other TLAs.
For instance we know some details about the MINARET project which was not the full extent of their spying that:
"Operating between 1967 and 1973, over 5,925 foreigners and 1,690 organizations and US citizens were included on the Project MINARET watch lists. NSA Director, Lew Allen, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1975 that the NSA had issued over 3,900 reports on the watch-listed Americans." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MINARET
One imagines that with the growth of technology and the growth of the NSAs budget from that time they are able to distractedly increase those numbers.
