What will they do with all those phone records?

What to do with all that data?  Fight terrorists?  Maybe.  Intimidate anybody they don't like?  Maybe that too.

Let's take an ambitious NSA employee and give him a list of all "sex for service" ads in Backpage and another list of all the phone numbers of people in the legislative branch, why heck just for grins let's check out the phone usage of FISA judge Roger Vinson and see who he's been calling lately too.  What do you think they'll find?  Who's going to stop them from doing just that?  Ron Wyden and the ACLU were right to warn darkly about the consequences of illegal spying.

Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, both Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a March 2012 letter to Attorney General Eric Holder that most Americans would “stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted section 215 of the Patriot Act.”
“As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows,” the senators wrote in the letter. “This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the public doesn’t know what its government thinks the law says.”

The blackmail notion has occurred to other bloggers as well.

Blackmailing citizens critical of the government seemed like a distant hypothetical, until we learned that the IRS was auditing Tea Party groups and journalists were being wiretapped. Nefarious actors inside the government like to abuse national security programs for political ends, and that should make us all (even more) suspect of government spying.
Some government secrecy is necessary for national security purposes. But it’s justified based on our trust that the information will be used with care. With every passing scandal, the justification for these types of programs becomes more and more questionable.

 Should you be worried too?