Arguing invasion of privacy against constitutional rights for datamining phonecall logs is silly when comparing it to original intent. You are reminiscing about the good ol' days and ignoring the fact that it isnt the same world. Electricity, internet, email, phonecalls, highways, railroads, airplanes, engines, metal ships, voice communication, etc didnt exist. White land owning males could vote, and the country was 1/6 of the size with an even smaller fraction of people that literally lived in daily danger of dying or having all their stuff taken away. Illegal search and seizure in 1776 was literally searching you/property and taking your stuff.
Flash forward to 2013. The reason the government is able to announce all these connections and information is precisely because it DOES datamine. You log everything, then if relevant info pops up, you check it out. Ie. Terrorist from Syria calls a number in Kentucky. You have historical records and can check out who they called and do a call chain. Live voice or even recorded monitoring requires at least a 1:1 ratio of people calling to people monitoring and usually requires an additional translator. There isnt enough time or money for that. Really, if you arent breaking the law (or suspected enough to have a warrant signed by a judge), or talking to someone who is breaking the law, you arent getting monitored.
So these 2 idiots blow up something at the marathon and FBI goes and snags all the historical data and looks like Captain Hindsight. Then everyone cries foul about: WHY DIDNT YOU GET THEM IF YOU KNEW?! The truth is they didnt know because nobody has time to monitor all that. Watching a couple highschoolers that popped up with a few phonecalls to Russia did enough to trigger a quick look, but nothing significant was found. But you dont want to let other bad guys know that. You show them you can track everything so they better not try it.
Back to the point; from an originalist constitutional standpoint: logging that a phonecall was made hasnt taken anything from you. Judges along the way have interpreted it as a seizure because the constitution severely needs updated and good luck getting congress to agree on anything. Those same judges will rule that if was done without a warrant in the US, then it isnt admissible in court anyway.
3rd party companies know everything about you. They know what you search for on the internet. Now THAT is scary. Talk about some inner demons. That info is sold to anyone and everyone, including governments and not just the US government and that is all fine because you willingly provided it and agreed to terms and conditions.
If you want to be ok with the government not collecting any data, then you have to be ok with many attacks on the US because there is no method to stop any attack without intelligence of some sort. At the same time, you should really be crying foul over all the private corporations that know absolutely everything about your daily life and sell that information wholesale.
To fear that somehow the government is going to repeat events leading to 1776 in today's society is naive. On a local scale you may have a few a few individual law enforcement that are doing the wrong thing, but to think that the military would crack down on the public against brothers and sisters is too much conspiracy for me. It's a volunteer force that values freedom and harbors as much disdain for politicians as the next guy. There is a reason the military and police are separate. One is supposed to protect the country from outsiders, and the other is supposed to protect the population from insiders. The military members and leaders arent robots (yet) and arent going to attack the US population. The police forces arent controlled by the federal government (the collectors of the intel). So youll be ok. Really.
EDIT: oh i forgot kkthx was brit. he's screwed. you americans are fine though.