>> They could always tap your phone, read your mail, follow you, find out some secret about you ... I think this is a false equivalency. It was the case that y

>> They could always tap your phone, read your mail, follow you, find out some secret about you ... I think this is a false equivalency. It was the case that you could be targeted, but this would be one case and a lot of resources were bound by this one case. Now, the process can be automated in such a way that everyone can be targeted simultaneously without much overhead. The main problem is not that you could be targeted (like you said, that was always the case), but that everyone could be a target.