Way to be dismissive. I bet you would have said the same thing to people a decade ago who thought the government was using the Internet to spy on them.

I thought that has been a given for a very long time- at the very least since 9/11.

The idea of pervasive monitoring and dragnet surveillance was very much an implausible tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory in the minds of the general public until the Snowden revelations came out. Everyone knew that we were surveilling terrorists, particularly since 9/11, but they weren't aware that the NSA/GCHQ were doing things like compromising major communications platforms of domestic companies and exfiltrating and storing data indiscriminately in case it became useful in the future.

I had teachers tell me that I was saying paranoid conspiracy theories when I talked about it way back before Snowden :)

It has happened before, it will happen again.