The media has been convulsed for days about the revelations that the NSA has been collecting metadata on phone calls between the USA and the rest of the world for years.
I have a few blunt comments about the brou-ha-ha.
1. The PATRIOT Act, nodded through in a fit of post-9/11 zeal for stopping "terrorism", drafted by the Bush administration, is one of the underlying enablers for this kind of covert surveillance, the other being FISA. The Patriot Act was renewed more recently, by a large majority of elected representative. We, the people...voted for our representatives, who waved through one of the underlying enablers. It is the fault of the electorate that the PATRIOT Act still exists. If electors want to prevent violation of privacy and covert surveillance, they need to stop voting for people who would cheerfully have the state collect this sort of information. There are actually more fundamental requirements that the electorate needs to embrace; namely, to stop being terrified by the mere mention of the word "terrorism", and to stop pretending that the government can make everybody safe all of the time.
2. Any GOP partisan who tries to claim that the current POTUS is violating constitutional rights and privacy expectations is either dangerously amnesiac, or a bloviating hypocrite. See (1) above for the explanation. Covert collection of data has been occurring for a long time, even preceding 9/11, as this analysis from ProPublica makes clear. It didn't suddenly start a couple of years ago at the behest of the current POTUS.
3. Collection of phone call records may actually be a correct method of collecting data for analysis of patterns. However, in order to justify collection of the data, there needs to be a cogent explanation of how the analysis can be executed and how it can produce useful results. When privacy rights are being abridged, the government owes citizens an explanation. "It's secret, trust us" doesn't cut it. Citizens are being required to give up something of value to all of us (i.e. privacy) in return for...what exactly?
UPDATE - This very thought-provoking article from Jay Rosen just appeared.
UPDATE 2 - A person Tweeted a week or so ago that the Pledge of Allegiance requires a modification to say

"One Nation, under surveillance"

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