I presented some of my doctoral research at a conference in New Orleans this summer. One of the keynote speakers talked about this. Computer science people are generally a liberal-leaning bunch, but the entire audience was universally libertarian on this point. You can find out essentially everything about a person from their “metadata” and the point was that whether the NSA associates the metadata directly with a person or not is irrelevant since it’s uniquely correlated to you anyway.
In other words, **** the NSA.
Academics, yes. Practitioners, no.
Most people in the trenches are apolitical or libertarian.
Anyone "in the life" knew from the beginning that you can find out just about everything you need to know about a call from its jacket and by datamining all of the interconnections within a cohort.
People who bought the excuse that "it was only metadata" were either stupid, ignorant of the facts, or deliberately lying.
Ah, but can they find the point of resolve...
How could that possibly be? It's a field where you produce something that either works or doesn't, objectively judge-able, and whether or not it works is based on real facts and rules and logic, not feelings. How could any liberal possibly compete in such a field.
The ironic thing about this is when it was exposed last year, and Snowden came along, the millenials became very wary of signing onto Obamacare, as they know it is another potential snooping source.