The government has never shown that spying on millions of people has netted them any real valuable information, such as preventing terrorism. If the NSA wants to know that I am going to visit my grandson on the weekend, who cares? Most things that most people communicate about, whether on the phone or on the Internet are so mundane, that if the NSA would pay attention to all that, they would all die of boredom. There are thousands of websites where hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people have made negative comments about our government.
If the government wanted to arrest everyone that has made in some cases some very nasty comments about Obama and his administration and other politicians, they would need a huge army of goons willing to do the dirty work and would overcrowd our prisons to the bursting point.
Instead of wholesale spying on everybody, the NSA could concentrate its resources on targeted surveillance on people that are already suspect of suspicious behavior or that they may be warned about by other governments. If they had done that, they could have most likely prevented the Boston Marathon bombings.