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They're not reading our emails, or listening to our phone calls, or looking at the faxes, text messages, none of it.
What they are doing is gathering a database of our communications, ready to investigate it when the 'need' arises.
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building algorithm profiles on individuals, which they are doing, is a massive invasion of privacy --is actually worse than real time reading of emails by an individual.
50 years ago most people would be paranoid to think the government was listening in on them. It was not economically feasible to task a person to listen to or follow another person unless the survailed individual was a known threat.
But today, data collection, storage and mining has reach such economies of scale that the cost is virtually nil to do all that to everyone and apply algorithms.
There are policymakers who think citizen gun owners are dangerous. Why would not IP coming into firing line have some utility when algorithm/machine cross referenced to other data?
I worked for a detective agency in college 30 years ago. They used to send interns down to the Suffolk country (Boston and environs) courthouse, say they were going to pay the parking tickets for a person being survialed/investigated and ask for all their parking tickets. The clerks gave up those ticket records 100% of the time with no ID. That often gave us lots of data on people's movements. Your wired and wireless IP trail (all metadata) is many orders of magnitude times more useful.
The issue today is not just the massive economies of scale, it is the younger generations' facebook induced devaluing of their own privacy. So we have both the technology and a social attitude shift that co-amplify the problem.
If the data is collected it WILL be mined. Years ago it was posited that major big box retailer were collecting transaction data not simply for marketing, but for the identification of less profitable "devil customers". hat was derided as paranoid. As the WSJ recently noted it turns to they have been doing exactly that, and selling and trading lists as well. You don't collect data and not use it in real time these days.