The point of view partly depends on whether or not you're charged with keeping people safe.
If your job is to prevent terrorism, you're going to want as many tools as you can get.
Western governments especially are not interested in spying on their populace, but being able to implement legal warrants in search of information that can safeguard life and property, or catch a past criminal.
Related programs like PRISM data collection are not about realtime surveillance, but being able to do a Google-like search of past history when legally needed. (Like how mass stored UK public camera videos are used only after a crime has been committed.)
An example was catching the person behind the failed Times Square bombing a few years back. A burner phone was used to buy the bomb vehicle, which had its VIN removed. However, investigators were able to find the Craigslist ad used to purchase the vehicle, look up the burner phone used, then request and get all the numbers that phone had called, or had called it, along with locations during the calls.
The ability to do this kind of legally warranted research quickly from stored records is why they were able to arrest the perpetrator only two days later and take him off an international flight from JFK which he had already boarded, Otherwise he'd have gotten away.
So there is definitely a balance to be made between protecting our privacy, and the right / need of governments to protect those same people and bring to justice those who would harm them.