I don't really care about any of that or your feelings and so forth. It's not really about your phone conversations and so forth. This will corrupt the government. It's about the possibility of
their or the phone conversations of powerful and influential people turning up at a key stroke. I.e... more important information than what you want to have for dinner ro the latest cat video turning up, etc.
After all, we already know that they're being blackmailed and that other attempts have been made.
Many Americans immediately frame this issue as being about themselves or their privacy, as if it's about the NSA listening in on their boring and trivial conversations or scanning their emails for key words. "Well, I have nothing to hide." Indeed. Who cares. It's not about you. Believe it or not, the world doesn't revolve around you. It's about the type of government and media that people are going to wind up with and
are already winding up with due to the centralization of power and the lack of checks and balances and the rule of law.
It's not about spying on some suburban soccer mom that doesn't even know what her civil rights are. Although it is about her tangentially, given that it's her husband or brother or her son or daughter that will be sent to war if enough politicians or political operatives or journalists can be successfully blackmailed, etc. It's also about her tangentially, if she has a 401K that winds up being looted by NSA/government insider traders and so forth that have access to information on everyone and their finances.
With respect to blackmail, some people have already tried to blackmail others even when nothing comes up in their databases (like it apparently did for Petraeus):
Kind of funny, I can only imagine: "Did you find anything on Edmonds?" "Uh.. well, there's this old parking ticket."