I understand your point but you might be missing NSA view on this. Their goal is (apparently) to source as much data as possible and, although breaking a jaw doesn't sound expensive as a one-off, it gets extremely expensive when doing it for a given percentage of the world population. In our own language, it's not scalable. And neither are the other options. Global automation of the gathering of personal data is much cheaper and much more useful (again, apparently).

>Global automation of the gathering of personal data is much cheaper and much more useful (again, apparently).

And completely legal (from their perspective), whereas attacking foreign citizens gets into grey areas.

While I agree with you, I don't think that's a grey area from their perspective either. The CIA has done it with the support of other governments.

That's a fair point. Really the whole thing bugs me. It seems they could be solving real problems with all those cycles.

Breaking your jaw is most definitely not cheaper. Not by a long shot.

The NSA could, for example, compromise Comcast routers, use this bug to MITM every single SSL connection to e-mail servers, and collect literally millions of people's credentials and messages.

The cost of doing the equivalent with "break my jaw" techniques is astronomical. You'd need massive manpower, huge facilities, and of course the public backlash would be almost incomprehensibly vast.

Programmers of all people should be able to understand that an automated, computerized solution can be applied to a large scale extremely cheaply, and that this is pretty much the only way to scale up to millions of users. In the NSA's case, it's targets instead of users, but the same principle applies.

The NSA wants all of the data. Technological measures is how to obtain it, and that's what they've been doing.