This is false, the snowden releases showed they have extensive infrastructure that aggregates data from many different sources.

At the end of the day, worldwide profit scales systems faster than even national security dollars.

Granted, they do not snoop on you to the maximum extent the hardware of these devices allow. But, take a look at [0]. Unless you are one of the few people who goes out of their way to limit tracking, do you think that the NSA would be able to get that detailed tracking of everyone's movements.

And this is just the obvious part (which Google is nice enough to share with its users as a feature). Big tech companies have also built detailed models of most people's interests; which is simply not possible without the large amount of data that comes from people actually interacting with them.

All of the NSA's dragnet surveillance is built on the back of private industry, and works because that private industry has convinced people to participate in it.

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/timeline

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2348156

"AT&T has a fiberoptic splitter copying our data to NSA" (eff.org)" (2011, 200 comments)

However there's also the massive Ogden Utah data storage center run by the NSA and contractors, which has a constant demand for 65 MW of power, I think that counts as mass surveillance infrastructure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

Seems pretty Orwellian.

Assuming the NSA catches and stores the traffic (i.e. it passed a keyword/subject filter), they still have to break the encryption.

And even if they have devices capable of doing so, they don't have capacity to do so on an unlimited volume of messages.

They're still pushing this stuff today, not surprisingly:

https://www.ctinsider.com/news/article/NSA-director-pushes-C...

> "WASHINGTON (AP) (Jan 12 2023) — A top U.S. intelligence official on Thursday urged Congress to renew sweeping powers granted to American spy agencies to surveil and examine communications, saying they were critical to stopping terrorism, cyberattacks and other threats."

"Other threats" such as what, populist movements unhappy with the increasingly feudalist-aristocratic nature of the United States and the gross corruption seen in Congress and the federal bureaucracy?

At some point, the metadata is (user X talks to SaaS service Y), and then the trail goes private.

If ATT had really pushed back, the NSA would have been hard pressed to install and run tapping equipment. And that's on hardline voice, where CALEA obviously applies. But as far as I know ATT didn't really fight, once they were legally covered from liability.

The modern large scale cloud or social providers are younger companies, have fewer government ties, and (critically) have worldwide business.

I would automatically assume they all have data sharing agreements with the NSA, as a maximal threat assumption, but as a likely threat I expect it'd be a lot harder for the NSA to co-opt them.

I.e. why the NSA instead chose to tap Google's private fiber between their data centers

You still think that the "security" certificates make you secure ? that s in https stands for security ?

Why would a spy agency collect TB of data without a mean to decrypt it ?

And the NSA is doing that because they can break a percentage of it, or anticipate they can in the future.

And it's order of exabytes of data.

Yes. When we elect our officials we grant them significant power. We have rules they must abide by to protect us from that power (I.e. using this data to interfere with elections to continue/advance their power.)

This is substantially different than private industry. Don’t get me wrong, surveillance capitalism is its own shade of gray. But the government laundering away constitutional rights through collaboration with private industry and protecting themselves from prosecution for their crimes by labeling these collaborations a state secret?

Between their clandestine organizations, their militaries, and their law enforcement - the government is capable of perpetuating more crimes against humanity than their private industry counterparts.

  The NSA is a big old bitch,
  "so are your fangs and VCs"
  says the crowd who has the itch
  for cool projects but sees
  all really as prostitution. Stitch
  up the foul mouth hey, one who pees
  in the water is bound to filth drink,
  work, make, grow rich but don't think.