Good for them, I hope.

I try to remember that someone had to authorize and fund the NSA. The NSA was not started by the NSA but by government.
Any country that has a for lack of a better word Spy Agencys it was requested and funded by that countries government.
Many countries have such agencies, some funded better than others.
I don't think MI5 or MI6 was a creation of Hollywood.
England with concern with the nation security started them.
No I'm not picking on England. All major nation have Security Agencies that do sneak and peak of all kinds of things. Some we know about and some we will never know about.
If only the world was perfect then their would be no need for such agencies.

I think most of us are aware that all countries have some form of a spy agency, run by their government. But I don't think many of are aware of just how much information they might have on each of us & what they may make use of it for.

What I want to know is why it is necessary to collect such information unless there is a very compelling reason to do so.

Often the problem is that someone unauthorised decides to expand the collection purely on the basis that they can do it with the technology available today.

I'd assume they collect the information and use a supercomputer to quickly scan through it all, looking for signs of terrorism like a spam filter looks for spam. Sometimes you can't see things coming obviously enough to know exactly where to search, you have to widen the net.

The biggest problem is a lack of trust in a government that people are quickly realizing doesn't have their best interests at heart. With their informational control, they could do some major damage if it all falls into the wrong hands (Mwhahaha). I'd still trust the government over companies like Facebook that see our information as profit, though.