Through this whole scandal about phone and internet data accumulation, my kneejerk instinct that it shouldn't happen has been countered with a general not giving a shit. I wasn't sure why I felt that way, whether it was a feeling that it wouldn't affect me or general cynicism about the futility of fighting City Hall.
David Simon's blogpost on this issue
This article suggests the entire issue is phony, that law enforcement has been doing the same thing for decades - to cite a smaller-scale example from days long passed, tracking call logs for public pay phones and beepers of the kind they knew criminals used. They didn't know which pay phone calls were for illegal purposes or which beepers criminals bought. But courts allowed them to accumulate call logs for all of them. What's going on is the same principle, only in ridiculously huge volumes.
The sketchy part is trusting that the government is only accumulating all this data to target the thing we would want them to use it for, i.e., catch terrorists. Even if everyone is currently using this data for unquestionably good motives, the infrastructure is now in place for someone who may assume power later with questionable motives, with little chance of checking them. I don't trust oversight in our government today. But the principle of accumulating data doesn't particularly bother me.