Bill Binney Quit the NSA because it went from using surveillance to determine when events would occur to collecting all data available.
Binney's ThinThread program looked at metadata - who is calling whom rather than the contents of the communication.
Program was too cheap and too efficient. Hayden and others launched Trailblazer which called for the collection of all data.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/nov/09/a-good-american-review-nsa-whistleblower-william-binney-911-world-trade-centre
Binney and his team perfected ThinThread, the then NSA director General Michael Hayden commissioned Trailblazer to be the agency’s signature surveillance system, farming billions of dollars of work to the private sector and pushing ThinThread to the sidelines. Trailblazer would later be scrapped as an unmitigated failure, but not before tragedy struck in New York. Drake tells us what could have been discovered and deduced in the NSA’s databases, if only ThinThread had been directed towards it. To rub salt into the wounds, the agency then took Binney’s work, removed the privacy protections, and used it to spy on American citizens.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/nsa-whistleblowers-security-thinthread-largest-failure-in-nsa-history/
"It was just too cheap," said Binney, about ThinThread, which he helped to pioneer and built in the years prior. "It was just a little bit ahead of its time for NSA to accept it."
"It cost $3.2 million to build it from scratch," said Binney. "And it was fully automated, and it didn't require people to run it. It was electronically downloadable… it wouldn't take any money to deploy it."
"[Trailblazer] was the largest failure in NSA history," said Binney. "Fundamentally they traded your security – mine, and everybody else's – for money. It's that simple"
What if rather than preventing terrorism what the government wants is a database that it can target anyone that steps out of line. In other words, we are obscure and hidden in a mountain of data until they target us. Then they have all of our conversations, photos, location, etc at hand.