>Every single government official and LEO talked to about this data say that gathering and keeping the data indefinitely on 260 million plates, in order to apprehend just 136 individuals, is good practice.

>If that's your definition of common sense, I want nothing to do with it.

I would think this is a perfectly acceptable reason from the point of the NSA, or as someone who would like as much data available as possible to debug a problem. If I could log every event on every cloud instance I've ever launched negligibly this would be something I obviously would want to do as it would help tracking down issues immensely (assuming that I'm not drowning from data overload).