Your seatbelt can't blackmail you, nor pull "LOVEINT" like maliciousness against you (i.e., it has no real negatives). Extensive surveillance, mass or not, is rife with the possibility for abuse.
The chances that my seatbelt kills me are probably higher than me dying or being harmed by mass surveillance. And I'm married to an Afghan.
Then again I'd probably guess that my seat-belt is significantly more effective at saving my life.
Plus most of the ability for abuse exists even without a system in place. If the government wants to discredit me they can make up evidence and get a warrant. Or they can just do warrantless wiretapping.
The ability to spy on all citizens exist whether it's used or not. That goes triple for metadata that companies keep anyway. As long as Google is spying, that information is ripe for being taken by government.
There is still a risk that a non-rouge part of government could use mass surveillance for shitty purposes. Like hunting down jews, homosexuals, civil rights activists, etc. But the whole government would have to break bad. And they could reinstate a mass surveillance apparatus in a couple months anyway.
I'm not really convinced that using the NSA to spy on suspected terrorists, spies, and drug cartels is really an significant risk to our freedom and safety in general.
Systems designed to prevent black swan events need to be evaluated against a higher standard than "there haven't been any since we started". That's not success, it's exactly what we would have expected anyways.
However, this article does the reverse. And claim that it is useless because it hasn't prevented something that never happened in the first place.
My seat-belt never saved my life but I put it on anyway.
0 for 0 isn't good information in either direction.