The law is aimed at commercial loss and identity theft stemming from data breaches. Whatever you think of the NSA, there's not a high risk its going to start selling data it collects on the black market for use in identity theft.
That's a big assumption considering you're talking about an agency which openly flaunts the law or lobbies it out of existence as needed (thereby showing very little respect for the rule of law) and whose individual agents have shown very variable levels of judgement in the use of those systems (e.g. the LOVEINT stuff).
On the contrary, I think that once that data is in the possession of a large amorphous non-accountable organisation with relatively few checks and balances, it is inevitable that said data will end up on the black market. Why wouldn't it? There's money to be made.
> If your Whatsapp or Google Hangouts has a deliberately introduced flaw in it, then foreign spies, criminals, crooked police (like those who fed sensitive information to the tabloids who were implicated in the hacking scandal -- and like the high-level police who secretly worked for organised crime for years), and criminals will eventually discover this vulnerability.
The police, the NSA, etc, cannot be trusted not to misuse information which they obtain. In fact, you can quite reliably trust them to misuse that information, if history is any guide (and it is).
Whether the misuse will include actually boldly grabbing some private information that's currently valuable and selling it on Evolution or Silkroute 3 or whatever, is a purely academic question. If the information is on NSA servers, and is valuable, and someone at the NSA knows about it, it probably will be misused in some way.
Imagine the private criminal opportunities that will become available to the NSA after 20 years of Moore's Law and bulk data collection.
The NSA is a threat to Americans just as much as anyone else.
A hacker can steal my identity and drain my bank account.I can survive that, and I can defend myself by being careful.
The NSA can arrange to have me blackmailed, my reputation destroyed, or even killed, and they are confirmed to do this to people in an industrial fashion.