I don't disagree with your reasoning at all--I have made those same arguments myself at various times. Where we disagree is on the meaning of data mining. When

I don't disagree with your reasoning at all--I have made those same arguments myself at various times. Where we disagree is on the meaning of data mining. When I think of mining, I think of deducing facts that are not directly present in the data. For example, imagine the government deducing your attraction to gay unicorns by some tangentially related facts about you {likes unicorns, watches teletubbies, is a brony} -> {attraction to gay unicorns}. My argument is that such a thing is impossible. There is nothing of interest that a government could learn about you through indirect means (mining relationships out of disparate data), that they can't learn through direct observation. That is, instead of having to deduce your attraction to gay unicorns, they would simply observe it in the virtual world (leak regarding monitoring of WoW). Under this understanding of data mining, worrying about the government mining is misdirection--they will simply watch your avatar get sodomized in real time.