You really don’t understand the issues, do you.
Put this way, The Government and Google knows more about you than your spouse or family and friends.
Knowledge is power. They aren’t going to use that power for your benefit.
Government and Google know about us what we let them know. My barber knows stuff about me too. Amazon knows what sort of books you like but only your car detailer knows where you put your boogers. My friends know stuff I’ve told them when I was drunk that I don’t even remember. Yep... There’s all sorts of folks that know stuff about us. Am I worried about all this? Not really. The information exists. That’s neither good or bad. It’s just a fact. What matters is what they DO with the information.
Put this way, The Government and Google knows more about you than your spouse or family and friends.
They only know as far as where you choose to browse the web, or even more forwardly, what you post on facebook of yourself. But then again, the internet is like your backyard: unless you have some towering wall around your yard, what you do outdoors in your yard is fair game for the neighbors to see.
Regarding going through data, this isn’t random, it’s overwhelmingly a keyword search in databases for people, places, and objects. No sane person would be interested in having to try and look for something in an investigation randomly browsing through the trillions of pages that exist on the web, or in databases, even for some of the world’s biggest geniuses who work for the government, such mental processing is highly impractical, shoot for the keywords, or the fingerprint matches, or who was at a specific proximity to a crime scene location.
The big illusion here is that the government is somehow exaggeratedly powerful with this system, however inadvertently, Edward Snowden, al qaeda, Taliban, etc, prove that even technology isn’t neccessarily a trump card, in fact, even the most advanced computer is limited by the mental capacity of the person operating it, and even then, the system is only really designed to specialize in a given realm.
NORAD was totally unequipped to deal with hijacked suicide airliners, even the most advanced air defense platform was reduced to finding flying needles in a haystack. Snowden and the other leakers demonstrated how incompetent and unprepared the NSA is in knowing who is loyal to them, despite acting tough and trying to look nice by talking smack about those who disagree with them, well, now you have a 30 year old who pranced away to Russia with your classified information, and now you pretty much can’t do anything about it.
My primary beef about security is that the way that the U.S. does it, is extremely wasteful, both in time as well as in money.
Information is totally used for your benefit: it’s used to prosecute criminals, who seldom, if ever, walk around with T-Shirts saying “ I am a serial killer” or shout out loud proudly on main street, I am going to go shoot some people tommorrow”. It doesn’t work like that, but collected evidence and careful database searches of information is workable.
“Knowledge is power. They aren’t going to use that power for your benefit.”
And yet information is used for the benefit of society all the time, criminal investigations, use databased information to narrow down suspects. The military always has spied and assasinated people, even during the American Revolution, where we took out British COmmanding Officers fairly frequently in battle. You are being quite narrowly selective in who you think spies on you. Government isn’t the only ones, plenty of your nongovernment Joes and Janes have had a fun time with hacking into a person’s laptop and/or webcam and eliciting information from him/her. Foreign governments wouldn’t think twice about probing information about people to get around and target. I don’t know, but there sure is a whole lot more outside of your circle of reasoning that you leave out here. A whole lot more. Spying is neccessary in going after criminals for no better reason than you can’t take most of them for their word anyways.