it is not just verizon. Read the details, AT&T and sprint as well as several other wireless providers are on the list being trawled. They are not just collecting metadata, they are trawling telcos because they don’t circuit switch (haven’t for a long time). Everybody uses packet switching right now, so there is no differentiation between data, voice, video, audio, email, anything. That’s why it’s called trawling, they access the whole pipe and supposedly only keep what they want, but they have everything that comes through that pipe (what they want and anything else that happens to be in the pipe as well - could be your data).
Dang -- we're the electronic krill and they're the baleen!