Re "... but do they have any other ability to use the data?"
Parallel construction or just keeping up on slag, street crime, terms, faces, people, voice prints, images sent, gps, serial numbers in each photo or video uploaded? A vast database of interaction, who is smart and turns their phone off, two people walking towards each other who turn their phones off before a meeting but where not understood to be connected until that deeper data mining uncovered their cell logs.
Locals find the locations, federal computers look over years of huge telco logs. Funding is hidden from a local walk in FOIA at a city and state level.

The cost of asking the phone company?
Letting a phone company flag or set a number been logged in a database. If staff or other nations have access to that phone company database then all legal wiretaps might get seen by a few different people or other intelligence agencies. The US seems to have found out over the years that it cannot trust its own tame telcos internal networking.

Yes all the paper files and audio tapes in the archives of Central and Eastern Europe from the early1990's should be a warning from history.
The West likes to collect too ;)

+1 for this. Divest from the tame brands that fooled generations with junk encryption.
Teach about the one time pad, number stations and other good encryption that works.
The whistleblowers over the decades have offered insights into how the telco networks work and how weak encryption standards are kept in place for generations.
"So long as the tame brands pretend to encrypt for us, we will pretend to communicate."
Get creative with local political issues and long emails to the local press. Fill the text with past stories about local events.
Drive around with an older working cell phone on random local events.

The part about a system of computer networks that protect dissidents, journalists, NGO's, faith groups, freedom seekers and other color revolution efforts could be open to law enforcement officials at a funding and skill well below an intelligence agency level.
If the anonymity and privacy on offer by onion routing for dissidents, journalists, NGO is trackable on domestic local enforcement budget then what are other well funded nations doing on their internal telco networks?
If the US at a police level can track all users on onion routing other what kinds of lists do other nations have or what have their domestic intelligence agencies found?
Public news like this sheds light on the low costs and ability to track onion routing. Down from intelligence agency to a state or city?

1+ for easily and percisely tag almost all photos we were able to stuff in it. In microseconds.
This tech is old for the 2d face work. Its fast for local police Privacy concerns? UK police test 'faster-than-ever' facial recognition software http://rt.com/uk/173292-facial... (July 16, 2014)
Or just read the public info on records per second in the 10,000 records/sec http://www.nec.com/en/global/r...

How is open code everybody can see, work on, understand and create with "a different monoculture?"
The past closed proprietary DHTML features?

+1 for this great suggestion. A good audio codec, video codec, encryption and emoticons. Clean new open code that works as a new instant messaging app :)

Re "It's a mail reader. That is all it needs to be."
Crypto GUI with the signing and encrypting.

From: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firef...
"50% of Fx users on Windows run 64 bit OS. We've reached a threshold where the effort makes sense."
Work on the webcam side now that HTML5 video is supported.

Re How in hell the voters from Britain as well as from America allow such things to happen in the first place??
Addiction. For the UK it goes back to the Defence of the Realm Act 1914 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... with the
"To prevent persons communicating with the enemy or obtaining information for that purpose..."
During and after ww1 the constant flow of new information became totally addictive to generations of UK governments. New laws to ensure funding continued.
Tempora is just this decades reflection of generations of networking and communications efforts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Another reason was the US and UK had got the German OKW-Chi work on from the Target Intelligence Committee teams (TICOM) on the Russian Fish system.
A Soviet military teleprinter that used packet switching was then open to the US and UK in 1945 thanks to German efforts during ww2.
Later efforts by German teams in the UK helped with the Caviar project but only got Soviet administration messages.
All that German material given to the UK in 1945 by the Germans was still been sorted by the UK into the early 1950's.
Russia has its own systems and was under constant decryption efforts by Germany in ww2 and then UK and German staff after ww2.
The same methods just kept on giving the US and UK what they needed for years and they where not going to tell the world about how easy it was or the ww2 german staff that where helping in mid 1945.
Think of it as a Operation Paperclip for ww2 German intelligence assets that kept on working in 1945 :)

In the early 1940's yes. By the 1950's the UK had an entire new generation of skilled people working on jet, nuclear and electronic brain projects. The GCHQ had moved onto helping the US with its difficult Korean war issues. By the 1950's Turing's role in ww2 and his 1950's travel was seen a huge security risk.
Any documents and hardware from the 1940's was also seen as a security risk. Why tell the world how the UK had won ww2 by reading German Red, Tunny material in realtime? Its a good trick that the UK could keep working with Tempora https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re China and the risks of intelligence, bugging and manipulation?
"remove high-end servers" and "replace them with a local brand" :) (05/27/2014)
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/...