The combination of voyeurism and the obsessive compulsion to collect the personal information of everyone at all times indicates two things.
1) Extreme boredom. There is not enough of a real threat to keep them occupied, so they deal in imaginary threats, then theoretical threats, then just voluminous mountains of utterly useless data. Why? Because it is there, and needs to be spied on.
2) Inefficiency. This indicts not just the intelligence community, but the entire government. They cannot deal with the major issues and real threats, so they focus on minutiae and data worth little more than randomly generated nonsense.
The East German Stasi was somewhat like this, keeping enormous dossiers on its citizens, filled with information like toilet paper consumption, routes to and from work, when they would eat lunch, etc. And even though they had coerced half the nation to inform on the other half, it still amounted to nothing.
The bottom line is that the United States 16 major intelligence agencies, its 100+ federal police agencies, and its other horribly bloated bureaucracy are unsustainable and need to be seriously pruned. Not just because they are overgrown and inefficient, but because the US needs some amount of what they are supposed to be doing, which they are not because they are messing around with trivia.
“horribly bloated bureaucracy are unsustainable and need to be seriously pruned.”
Attention citizen: the IRS has discovered evidence of possible fraud in your tax returns.
Please report immediately to the nearest NAS instillation to for an informational interview.
Two things in the same phrase: Criminalize Everything.