The thing is, I don’t think it’s wrong to be concerned about the government doing this kind of surveillance of American citizens on such a massive scale. There really are serious issues about privacy with programs this enormous, even if they’re only gathering metadata. There’s a LOT that can be learned from data like this, even without having the content of the calls.

But the way the media has hyped this story, they’re giving people completely false impressions about what’s going on, and making them think the government is listening to everybody’s phone calls and reading everybody’s emails. Which they’re not.