Many people haven't realized this yet, but that's
exactly what they're saying. Their thinking is that they're like an "anti-virus", and they can protect everyone if you just let them
infiltrate everything.
They've had this thinking since at least 2010 when I saw them talking about it in a public debate with Bruce Schneier, but probably much earlier, since it already seemed like a planned thing. Unsurprisingly perhaps, it came soon after US Cyber Command was formed, and then merged with the NSA. That's when this corrupted idea (probably from Keith Alexander himself) started emerging, and why it's so dangerous to keep them merged (something Obama keeps defending, even after his own non-independent review panel suggested him to separate the two).
So their idea of security, isn't actually having secure systems (anymore?!), but for them to have backdoors into everything, which of course is nonsense, and they are creating more problems than solving. But for all we know that's exactly how they like it, much like the war on terror, which keeps being prolonged by creating more terrorists, and keeping the Military Industrial Complex well fed and profitable.
Or they think all the data they are collecting about the whole world is well worth risking having compromised systems, even at home, but they present the idea of themselves having to do this to "protect Americans" as a lie to cover for that, and because they know it sounds better to the public and (some) politicians.