The big point about the current direction the surveillance is headed is that it's not even targeted: it's just a sweep of all the bits at all the places that are available. That phone call you made today will not be the subject of an investigation. But it will be available in the future, when you do step out of line, in whatever way you will.
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Precisely right.
Contemporary forms of "surveillance" are built upon cheap data storage and ubiquitous computing. As you say Jordan, immediate 'investigation' has little to do with it; 'data harvesting' and 'data warehousing' for potential future use are the actual goals.
This was the design assumption of the Total Information Awareness program (officially killed, but lingering in an undead state, its spirit scattered across various smaller efforts).
Imagine a massively parallel data storage network, not like Google's, dedicated to logging electronically traceable actions -- phone calls, emails, credit and debit card transactions, flights, etc.
Now, stop imagining and realize that this is what has been made possible by inexpensive, high gigabytage hard drives, improved search algorithms and relatively cheap, yet remarkably powerful CPUs.
.d.