If the USG wants to protect us from any country they consider an aggressor in the info wars, then they need to equip every one of us (its citizens) with the tools to protect ourselves.
The US does not know which of the kids today will grow up to be a Senator, Congressman, President, NSA agent, CIA agent, etc. If one of the infowar aggressors had the kind of information on every US citizen that we suspect the NSA to have, then that means that they could have enough information to blackmail many of this nation's future leaders, with many of us being none the wiser.
Take David Patraeus for example. What if a foreign intelligence agency knew about his extramarital affair, but no one else did. That's a perfect circumstance for that agency to coerce him.
Add to that fact that the NSA and CIA recruits heavily from the Mormon community. Imagine if one of those people was a gay and still had not come out about that fact. Such a person may be extremely worried about being outed to their friends and family in their religious community. Imagine if a foreign intelligence agency knew everyone who was was still in the closet. They would all be blackmailable. [0]
[0] One of my very close friends is bisexual and was raised as a very devout Mormon (but left the Church years ago) and she completely agrees that this could be a reality for a Mormon who has not yet come out of the closet, because of how much that community chastises people who are gay. Most of the people she knew growing up completely disowned her since coming out of the closet and leaving the Church.
Well the USG has given us SHA-1, NSA Suite B collection of Cryptographic standards, NIST-organized crypto standards, and have funded the development and most of the ongoing maintainence of Tor.
So they're trying to be helpful in that regards, which is why you can't just talk about USG as if it was a single-headed monster.
Protecting us from enemies that could coerce future leaders has the great benefit of also protecting us from the NSA.
Certainly. But they've also given us CALEA-mandated backdoors into telecommunications equipment and a regulatory environment that encourages wanton third party custody over sensitive information.
Obviously some of this is subtle and unintended. For example, allowing government-issued spectrum monopolies to be leveraged into walled garden mobile devices is seriously bad for security because it excludes anyone from improving the security of the device's OS or system components other than the manufacturers/carriers who coincidentally have the incentive to deny anything that would reduce user dependence on cloud-based data storage.
The point being, even if we're not doing nothing, we could be doing more.
Fully agreed on that!