We haven't actually been getting the data to make an informed decision on these, either. It took nearly a year to get any sort of numbers out of the government regarding how many people were being targeted[1] and they still haven't given any numbers on incidental collection. Meanwhile, most of the the media has been claiming that the communications of millions or even billions of people are being swept up, and now the Washington Post is actually looking at the data they've had for the last year and saying the number is more likely to be somewhere around 900k worldwide. I'm not saying that's necessarily a great number, but that's orders of magnitude less than what we've been led to believe. Nor does the article go into much detail on what "incidental" really means versus "targeted" - are these people in contact with the actual targets, or completely unrelated? Is there a better way to protect the privacy of these people without compromising actual intelligence operations? If not, which side should we err on, and how far?
These are tough questions to answer - especially without hard facts. It's hard to have an honest debate when we the people are left trying to discern the actual facts somewhere between the secrecy and sensationalism.
The conspiracy theory is a bit more complex. The NSA has two programs for upstream collection prior to 9/11 2001. THINTHREAD and STELLARWIND.
THINTHREAD was designed by long time NSA personnel to protect privacy while providing comparable digital surveillance capability to ECHELEON's capability in the analogue world.
STELLARWIND was the full take and archive program.
The White House chose the lower privacy technology, forced the people involved in THINTHREAD into retirement and then prosecuted the whistleblowers.
I don't think they are. I think the dragnet did started with good intentions, does bring some useful intelligence and is kind of useful.
The problem is the collateral damage is just too high, and the debate should be around that.