The Problem With the 'Privacy Moderates'

[Android3.14]

22. Now we are getting somewhere

So if I understand correctly, you are saying that 1. The government should not spy on innocent people, 2. that spying on a person must include the existence of a file about the person's private life for it to constitute spying, and 3. You have yet to see proof that the government is doing so, beyond what "always goes on."
I'd like to examine point 2 first.
As a school teacher, I would make a sociogram to help me build cooperative groups from the population of my students.
It is a very powerful tool.
I would hand out index cards and ask students to put there name on it, and the names of three people with whom they would like to work on a class project. From the data, I could build a map with the names of the students, (boy's names in squares and girl's in triangles) with lines and arrows connecting those squares and triangles showing me who was the most popular kid (multuiple lines pointing to him), who was the isolated kid (no lines pointing to him, but lines pointing to others), the cliques (kids who have names pointing to each others in a daisy chain that includes few outsiders). That collection of metadata (just four names) would provide me with amazing amounts of information about the individuals in the classroom.
When I took that data and combined it with the school records (think tax records and other government data), I could determine even more information about a student's possible internal landscape, from possible child abuse, neglect, ugly divorces, socioeconomic status, romantic interests and more.
I never kept the map or the cards, except for a list of names to put together in cooperative groups. Yet I would bet there are people out there who could have used that information for purposes that had little to do with protecting the welfare of the child.
All the data on the lives of those kids came from simply examining the small additional information of who they wanted to work with, similar to a list of phone contacts or Facebook "likes".
A file on an individual is unnecessary. The collection of the data is all that needs to happen, because the individual information is within the metadata.