What the nutjobs were saying was (and remains) that the NSA reads all your email and listens to all your phone calls or that it has unfettered access to this data. The Snowden leaks confirmed this to be false, but the nutjobs keep claiming it.

People said "everyone knew about" phone metadata collection because they did. It was a huge news story in 2006 when USA Today broke it. https://www.kpcc.org/npr-news/2006-05-11/phone-companies-gav... https://www.npr.org/2006/05/11/5398629/report-nsa-collecting...