Pointless in what sense? In that the Washington Post needs to make money or that you want quality journalism, no ads, to pay nothing for it, and golden unicorns to ride on?

Also, the original page has a single page, no pagination:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-tr...

I'm not sure which plugins you have running, but it definitely splits it into three pages for me.

Three pages here as well.