then the obvious one is that the NSA and pals wanted a really compelling reason to greatly erode the US Public's ability to resist extensive wiretapping and other forms of domestic espionage.
This is basically the correct approach to pull stuff apart. Virtually any government when they target the "other", the actual ultimate end-goal is control of their own domestic population. Usually a giveaway is where they care more about the publicity than the results.
One example is that Australian conservative government and their history of "anti-refugee" legislation / grandstanding. This resonated with the conservative anti-immigrant racists. However, when you look at the numbers, that same government only locked up
4% of refugees coming to Australia by boat, with the 96% who come by plane being basically let out and
completely unsupervised, purely based on a technicality of how they got here, while they also ramped up skilled immigration and temporary work visas far higher than before. By targeting a
very small percentage of the refugee flow they were careful not to over-extend themselves, there was almost no legislation at all restricting the 96% of plane-traveling refugees at all. (in fact the nations most likely to overstay visas here are just about the least likely to be found in a detention centre).
So they
flooded cheap labor in to crush the unions, while basically doing literally nothing about the bulk of refugees, yet the high-media-impact story of them locking up some families who came on leaky boats sold them to the public as "tough on immigration". The
target wasn't refugees at all, it was a marketing campaign aimed at the Australian public. In fact, when Tony Abbott was about to lose party leadership he suddenly went "gee I love refugees, let's bring thousands of those poor Syrians over". Then within a week of that amazing back-flip he was ousted in a party vote. So mr "tough on refugees" who pushed
concentration camps for women and children literally didn't give an actual shit at all, and would happily bring in thousands more refugees if it kept him in power another week.
So none of the anti-refugee shit is actually about refugees at all, it's about getting the citizens to vote for you. Refugees are just the collateral damage.