Metadata has critical value. And private communications are being monitored, recorded, and searched as well. (Many people, myself included, also reject the notion that unauthorized collection and recording is fine as long as the subsequent searches and filters are authorized.)
You seem to be taking government descriptions at face value, despite documented evidence to the contrary.
Consider the possibility that the government you seem to place absolute trust in is not, in fact, perfect.
You seem to be attempting to paint everyone who disagrees with you as someone who stockpiles baked beans and ammo in a bunker. You also seem to have no concept of any middle ground between "absolute trust in the infallibility of government" and "radical anarchist".
Let's make this concrete, instead. Anyone can, today, using off-the-shelf software, store information such that only someone with a passphrase can access it, and such that all the computing power in the world would take centuries to access it without the passphrase.
In such a scenario, I don't expect anyone to "trust" anyone, or to need to. (Modulo the issue of trusting the software to be properly implemented, which is a separate discussion but has some plausible solutions.) Instead, I expect that the software in question will prevent unauthorized access, as it was designed to do.
And for private comms, they have filters that filter them out for US citizens, as the Snowden leaks show.
LOL when people find out that the Snowden leaks actually show the NSA protecting privacy rights of US citizens, in a top-secret program.