Before the advent of digital communications, if the government wanted to covertly know what you were up to, they would have to break into and bug your home, tamper with your telephone, physically follow you around. It was difficult and expensive, so out of necessity limited to the most interesting targets. Yes the definition of 'interesting' varied from country to country and time to time, from criminals to political dissidents to inconvenient minorities, but the majority of people were generally safe from being watched.
Now, and for the first time in history, it has became economically possible to surveil the large majority of the population. And governments around the world have gleefully taken advantage of this, expanding the definition of 'interesting' to cover, literally, everyone; metadata is scooped up en masse, and communication content is available at the press of a button - constrained only by self imposed and often flimsy legal limits.
But, post Snowden, with the increasing implementation of end to end and zero knowledge encryption, the pendulum is starting to swing back again. Unless they force manufacturers to backdoor every phone and computer, governments will have to go back to the old ways of doing things, by physically hacking individual devices.
The article doesn't seem to indicate an increase in surveillance powers, but rather a realization by the security services that the glory days of embarrassingly easy mass snooping are beginning to end, and now they're going to have to actually work for their information.
If this gets us back to an era limited, targeted and suspicion led surveillance then this is a good thing, no?