No, that is what
YOU say based upon your limited critical thinking skills.
If I defend data collection, it begs the question of what am I going to use that data for in order for me to justify to myself the effort. If I run a chain of supermarkets, I cannot simply wake up one day and say to my managers: 'Starting today, we are going to collect consumer purchases at all stores and do it just for the heck of it.' I have to find a usefulness for that effort. Whether my competitors or even my managers agrees with my perception of that usefulness or not is a different issue. So if my intention is custom tailor my stocks to each store's demographics, that is my justification and based upon that I will defend my data collection and analyses against criticisms.
The NSA is nothing like a supermarket. It does not provide a public utility like a market does and this is the difference that you refused to consider because you are desperate --
SO DESPERATE -- to bring US down to China's level of controlling access to the Internet and censorship of the information flow from the Internet. The American public is not so stupid as you would like to believe. We know that Google collects data the same way banks and supermarkets does. The American public's distaste is not about data collection, as news articles routinely simplistically portrayed the issue, but about the government's access to these information and
WHAT could be done with the data. The US government does not tell Google, Ask, or Duckduckgo, on what information to pass through their servers, especially information of a politically sensitive nature, the way the Chinese government does to Internet service providers in China. And this difference is what troubles you.
Hey...I criticizes my friends, so why not countries to their allies? What a lame-@$$ argument. Go figure...