I have no doubt that United States uses it's spying on Europe to conduct industrial espionage - sharing the loot with the US companies that act as arms of the NSA, FBI and so on - but probably also to spy on European politicians and high ranking bureaucrats, trying to find skeletons in the closet that they can use to blackmail them.

The utterly spineless Viviane Reding for example; her meek "I must believe what the American government says" is hard to explain otherwise, nobody that naive in real life would have an IQ high enough to be able to act as a commissioner.