> It could be that they target specific individuals of the Turkish government instead of storing and analyzing everything that goes in and out of Turkey.
Maybe. But how do they do that? Do they individually hack into routers only when and where needed to keep up with their targets? What do they do when the packets used by their targets hop to a different router? What do they do when their target uses a mobile over 4G instead of their PC and Ethernet? What do they do when the data packets emitted by the target's mobile are transferred as a batch with a bunch of people not relevant to the intelligence need?
Maybe they do filter first and only store information relevant to their specific targeted intelligence needs. If NSA limited themselves to that, would your concerns go away?
> As for the question of Turkey being a valid target, let me remind you that several people in the Turkish government were planning a false flag operation in order to invade Syria.
You're preaching to the choir here. But let me remind you, that on Sept. 11, 2001, several people in the al Qa'ida organization actually carried out a real operation that resulted in ~3,000 deaths directly (not all American either), the destruction of a significant amount of property, and the launch of the "global war on terror" and invasion of Afghanistan. Even more, it set the conditions politically in the U.S. for the later invasion of Iraq. Truly, the consequences were quite epochal.
Yet many opponents of NSA surveillance will tell you quite bluntly that even counter-terrorism is not an important enough concern to make surveillance on the Internet worth the cost to civil liberties. They'll even tell you that more people die of car accidents every year than died in 9/11. What would you say to them? Why is it OK to target Turkey to detect covert false flag attacks but not OK to target transnational terrorist organizations that are actually killing people every single day, and plotting further attacks?