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.