My point was they were essentially MITM'ing all traffic in google data centers. I fail to see how that "makes the US more secure".
"The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials.
By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-i...
Hacking private companies and spying on Americans seems outside their charter IMO.
Aside from phone metadata collection, they weren't spying on Americans. They could tap communications of non-Americans outside the US, and they could find those communications in Google WAN traffic crossing the US border. It's Google's fault for not encrypting it because any number of other countries with fewer laws against spying on their citizens could have done the same thing. It is good that Google and other Internet companies now use https everywhere and encrypt their WAN traffic, but the threat vector should have been well known at that point given what China had already been doing publicly for years.
On the other hand, there were multiple stories about the guy from Saudi Arabia who was at twitter and I think he got away back to S.A.