> "You're not allowed to know everything but you have to prevent everything".
The thing is, security agencies (not just in the USA) have failed, repeatedly, to act on information they did have. Part of if may have been due to inter-agency rivalries, part of it may have been the agencies drowning in data and being unable to draw any useful intelligence from it. But with this in mind, the demand to let them gather more and more data seems unlikely to solve any of these problems, even if one does not care much about privacy.
The thing is, security agencies (not just in the USA) have failed, repeatedly, to act on information they did have. Part of if may have been due to inter-agency rivalries, part of it may have been the agencies drowning in data and being unable to draw any useful intelligence from it. But with this in mind, the demand to let them gather more and more data seems unlikely to solve any of these problems, even if one does not care much about privacy.