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I wouldn't be so cynical. The real goal is to catch stupid criminals. Not all criminals are stupid, but most are.The real goal is to expand the state. Bureaucracies, like cancer, want to expand into any aspect of their subjects lives they can. They get job security, bigger budgets, and more power as they expand, what's not to like?
Individual opinions (of politicians, bureaucrats, etc) don't really matter, as the aggregate dynamics of a state/organization tend to expansion and self-preservation -- even if an organization has no real role or is mostly BS (eg TSA).
Besides, nothing wrong with being cynical. Remember McCarthy? The real goal of the collection of data then wasn't to "catch stupid criminals". They collected data on politicians, journalists, businessmen, etc. Same thing with now public records of 10 and 20 years later -- check the files on people like MLK, Lennon, civil rights leaders, etc.
(And of course anybody with experience from European governments like in Italy, Greece, Spain, France, and so on, knows that private info/surveillance is used against whom which the state considers an "internal enemy" all the time, and in fact collection on those was far more common up to the 90s than collection on criminals -- which merely had their criminal record, and periods when they were bugged in suspicion of a crime, whereas politicians, businessmen, activists, writers, journalists etc were tracked all the time).
