Mass surveillance is about terrorism. It's just not only about terrorism, or mostly about terrorism. When terrorism is invoked what the public is left with is

Mass surveillance is about terrorism. It's just not only about terrorism, or mostly about terrorism. When terrorism is invoked what the public is left with is, 'oh it's used for that so that's what it's intended for'. Surveillance is about power, plain and simple. Surveillance is information and this is the information age. Information is a weapon and it drives the world. Intelligence on persons of interest, propaganda, censorship, 21st century census operations, information for guiding policy, protest and riot management, aid in background checks, information support for public affairs and diplomacy, detection of cyber attacks - all of these things are enabled by massive data collection and analysis systems. There are hints, from the Snowden docs especially, and from others, that these systems are used for these purposes. So yeah, they are used for terrorism. In the US when the Attorney General did an investigation into why the brothers hadn't been caught by the FBI and National Counter Terrorism Center, it did just that. The report named the NSA two times - ones in the opening paragraph and once in the appendix. FBI use NSA intelligence to support investigations, but the NSA is not in charge of counter-terrorism. Other agencies have asks of the NSA and yes - I think it was Drake, but maybe it was Binney? - whistleblowers have reported on these capabilities being used to do background checks (in this case on Obama before he ran for President); they've been used against journalism outfits (the Associated Press); they've been used in cyberwar; they've been used for corporate espionage; their fusion centers have been used to target political parties (Tea Party) and protests (Occupy); the UK used them for propaganda in the Falkin Islands. Dragnet surveillance is not about terrorism. Or rather, it is not, has never been, and will never be merely about terrorism.