Ahh, but they are tracking you and me. Our conversations, our phone records. And when you're searched at the airport, it's for the sake of protecting the aircraft and others. When my phone records are searched, it doesn't protect anyone when they dial. When the police search your car for reasonable suspicion, there's reasonable suspicion. When the government searches your phone records and/or listens in to your call...there's not.
This is in no small way about scope. There is no way millions of Americans--and, yes, again, including you and me--are worthy of reasonable suspicion. And there's no way you can make finding a needle in a haystack easier by making the haystack bigger and bigger.
The motives of the communists were obviously far less pure, to say the least, but as far as tactics go...this is right up their alley. And, for that matter, as far as the bureacratic mentality goes, it is, too.
I'm sorry, but your not only wrong, but you appear to be rationalizing. When they use computers to examine networks of phone number interactions looking for patterns that might indicate terrorist activity, they are protecting everyone on this "aircraft" called the USA.
No one is listening to your phone calls unless you are talking to known terrorists--i.e., soldiers fighting against the US.
Keeping tabs on interactions between telephone numbers in no way indicates any suspicion of you or of me. But it is based on a very reasonable suspicion that terrorist forces might be working in this country to kill thousands of people. Just as I give up some expectation of privacy at an airport or when I'm driving on the highway, it's reasonable for me to allow this gathering of phone call data.
Blind libertarianism is a path to national destruction.