Their biggest problem is separating the wheat from the chaff. Why would they want to intentionally add yottabytes of extraneous stuff to their servers when
it is outside their mission?
They have to get their funding from Congress - the NSA doesn't create money out of thin air. If they are intentionally storing stuff that is not part of their mission, then they are using money and resources that should be used for other things (thereby not doing that work and risking all sorts of bad things) and not doing the things that they should be doing (thereby risking all sorts of bad things). They aren't hoovering up the Internet because they feel like it, playing around like kids at Wonka's factory.
The USPS logs all mail in its system -
http://www.nytimes.c...il-mail.html?_r=0
Mr. Pickering was targeted by a longtime surveillance system called mail covers, a forerunner of a vastly more expansive effort, the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States  about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not known how long the government saves the images.
Together, the two programs show that postal mail is subject to the same kind of scrutiny that the National Security Agency has given to telephone calls and e-mail.
The mail covers program, used to monitor Mr. Pickering, is more than a century old but is still considered a powerful tool. At the request of law enforcement officials, postal workers record information from the outside of letters and parcels before they are delivered. (Opening the mail would require a warrant.) The information is sent to the law enforcement agency that asked for it. Tens of thousands of pieces of mail each year undergo this scrutiny.
Are they "snooping" on all of us? No. Is it unconstitutional? No. Is it overbroad and are there insufficient safeguards? Maybe, maybe not.
The NSA doesn't read everyone's e-mails. They don't have enough money, enough people, enough time to do that. It's outside their mission. It's a distraction.
I assume you're just as outraged at GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 and have let your MP know about it?
https://www.mi5.gov....q/mi5-or-mi6.aspx
<sigh>
What I find outrageous is that we have people in Congress who have helped destroy the world economy, and that continue to fight sensible policies to lessen the suffering of people, and that refuse to work on the important problems that are facing our nation and the planet. This NSA-outrage stuff is small beans.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.