If it were the case, I would expect companies to be involved in corporate espionage, not the government.

Once collected and analysed, this data is going to be like a kind of "credit rating". It will show who is a social influencer and what are his/her political leanings and their social network. Even if they are clean, a motivated party could blackmail them if anyone in their immediate circle has done anything illegal.

Imagine if mafia got a copy of this. What could they do with a blackmail database?

Not that i'm putting on my tinfoil hat or anything, but from what I understand, Obama essentially did that (assigned something like a 'voter' rating) during the last election. Not through any illegal means, mind you (that i'm aware of), but still he was able to win the election handily through efficient social engineering and voter targeting. So there does appear to be a use case for this being effective.

That does actually raise an interesting question -- assuming this network still exists in ten years time, what happens to it? Does it get folded into the tax bureaucracy, healthcare, do lawyers get to access it?

Imagine if mafia got a copy of this. What could they do with a blackmail database?

Strictly speaking, not much more than they could do now, just hacking people's likely easily bruteforced email and social media accounts. They'd be more interested in a credit card number/SSN database anyway I think.

But that doesn't explain the 'heat map' as a map of industrial espionage. Egypt is 'hotter' than Germany, and Iran, Afghanistan and Syria are red hot. It makes far more sense as a map of locations of intelligence gathering interest.