Yes, but the "dragnet" type stuff is the more important one. If you "attract the all-seeing eye" to the point of getting personal attention (being hacked or physically bugged), it means that government already has more than enough reasons to get rid of you and nothing can keep you safe from an AGM-114 flying through the window and/or enough red-tape being unleashed on you to make you die in misery. They probably just need some information from you to go after someone else.
On the other hand, mass-scale surveillance enables you to actually find targets of interest out of sea of people irrelevant to the case. Because the usual problem is, you know there are Bad Guys[0] out there, but you don't know where. Mass-surveillance makes the search much, much less expensive. So they really care about it.
And there's also an issue of Big Data, aka. whatever data they collect on people can in the future be used in a ways we can't even imagine now but won't like when it happens. So the data itself is also a danger. Also humans make mistakes, and algorithms are not always good, and no one would like to have their home raided because some long-forgotten bayesian filter buried deep in the system didn't use logarithms properly and introduced serious errors to probability computations. That's why people care.
[0] - relative to what govt. sees as bad at the moment.
On the other hand, mass-scale surveillance enables you to actually find targets of interest out of sea of people irrelevant to the case. Because the usual problem is, you know there are Bad Guys[0] out there, but you don't know where. Mass-surveillance makes the search much, much less expensive. So they really care about it.
And there's also an issue of Big Data, aka. whatever data they collect on people can in the future be used in a ways we can't even imagine now but won't like when it happens. So the data itself is also a danger. Also humans make mistakes, and algorithms are not always good, and no one would like to have their home raided because some long-forgotten bayesian filter buried deep in the system didn't use logarithms properly and introduced serious errors to probability computations. That's why people care.
[0] - relative to what govt. sees as bad at the moment.