I read your post and it sounds like you're affirming my point, so I'm confused. Only counter-argument I see to "so what" is the Manning link with their chat log, but... Having a rogue actor with access to your personal data is a problem, but then the actor is a criminal, and Manning would be in jail until 2045 had Obama not granted executive clemency. So, it's still not a concern to me. The only vulnerability I can think of is having the data stolen through hacking, for which I can only hope Facebook and/or the NSA are not vulnerable to non-governmental agencies in that regard; if a foreign government agency steals all our data from Facebook, I have less of a problem with the fact that Facebook collected our data than the fact that this is now an international issue between governments.
The greater argument is data wants to be free. It wants to be used. The NSA has data centers colocated with Google and Microsoft in Utah and Texas (as I recall) and These United States have more of an appearance of civil-commercial separation than a reality of civil-commercial separation. We know Google and the NSA are thick as thieves. We know the NSA and the DEA are thick as thieves. If I sell drugs, and you buy drugs, and I send a text message to my dealer, if at any point that dealer gets busted Jeff Sessions can assemble ex-post-facto that you bought drugs from me. Now: I live in Washington State, where I can buy more weed than I could ever smoke from a convenience store walking distance from my house. I got guys spinning signs on the sidewalk that say "WEED HERE." Jeff Sessions don't give a fuck. That's just one example of data leaking from irrelevant use to prosecutorial use. The Stasi example is there to demonstrate that data is forever but administrations change. The majority of the McCarthy witch trials were about who knew who and who went to what meeting thirty years previously; it gave Hollywood conservatives a way to settle the score with Hollywood liberals. Despite winning WWII, Robert Oppenheimer died under scandal because he was a Jew - I mean, because he'd been to some meetings when he was in his '20s. And that's back when people had to stand up and accuse you in court - they didn't have to pull up your metadata from a .csv buried deep on a magneto-optical tape drive five formats dead. It's not the vulnerabilities you can think of. It's the vulnerabilities yet to arrive.
Thanks for the explanation, I have no problems with what you're saying. I think I'm just reacting emotionally from being pissed off by what I perceive to be stupid news. See enough stupid news, start bleeding onto actual insight.
Back when Snowden broke I tried really hard (and often failed) not to be "fucking duhhhhh people Bamford and crew had all this shit up to and sometimes including the code names back in the mid '80s." I mean, it had been conclusively proven that the NSA was processing all (all) domestic telecom traffic through a diverter wherein they siphoned off all (all) of it. I think the experience taught me that so long as they're outraged, you can't be mad. I mean, you can be bitter that they didn't give a shit back when it could have helped but truly: better late than never.