Given:

Things like mass phone surveillance, passively breaking legitimate encryption used by non criminals, introducing vulnerabilities, and other plainly illegal behavior is being deployed against citizens

..with no recourse..

..which are answered with outright lies when challenged (c.f. Snowden, Clapper's lies before Congress)..

..and the methods are of dubious actual effectiveness when it comes to "keeping people safe"

..and they in fact reduce safety when it comes to introducing vulnerabilities which can be misused by criminals

Therefore:

The aims of said behavior is plainly not to "keep people safe", but some other alterior motive. Simple statistics show that garden variety cybercriminals are a more real threat to the average person than terrorists - so do no statisticians work for the feds, or is there a different plan we're not seeing?