National security is important. Like, one of the most important things in our lives.

I disagree.

List of things that are more important than national security:
1: My family's lives and security.
2: My friend's lives and security.
3: Anything that increases overall utility more than continued national security would.
4: Continued adherence to foundational national beliefs/ideology.

The first and second ones being prioritized is just due to flaws in human nature, but the last two are actually more important.

Utility is both hard to define, and can vary from person to person, and for most people a lot of utility is tied up in their home country, that's where their friends are, that's where their family is, etcetera. And of course there is a level of inherent bias towards it as well. As such following your utility function will often mean acting in the interest of national security.

But often is not always, and there can be very clear cases where maximizing utility means going against the interests of national security.

That's not relevant here though, at least not unless your person privacy is a part of your utility function (which for most people, it is not).

The last point, however, very much is. If you believe that a country is worthwhile and deserves to be preserved, then you have to define what that country actually is. is it the people? perhaps, but the people die and we still consider the country the same country it was before, so a better definition of a country can be seen in it's culture and foundational beliefs.

What is considered a foundational belief of a country varies depending on who you ask, there are historical records as well, but for things like these peoples perception of a thing can be more important than the actual thing itself.

If you asked the average american what the core foundational belief of america was what do you think they would say? in my experience the most frequent answers are some variation of 'freedom' or 'liberty'.

With that in mind, for someone who vales their own privacy being free from the government ruffling through their things can be seen as just as valuable as any other type of freedom, so allowing it to happen could be viewed as a perversion of that countries foundational beliefs, and avoiding said perversion could be seen as important enough to justify the potential danger created by not aligning their interests with those of national security.

Personally? I don't actually care about that, I expect everything I do or say to be recorded and shared at basically all times (whether it is or not is irrelevant, the point being I never expect anything to be private in the first place), but I DO have beliefs that I would feel that way about should it come up, and those beliefs would massively outweigh the importance of national security.