"This argument can only hold on water by having a complete lack of faith in the rule of law. The biggest issue I have with this is that this describes a massive , coordinated system to use all this location data in ways that are way outside the legal framework in place by the initial court order from the FISA court."

The article title includes "What the Government Could Do With All That Location Data". The emphasis is on what is technically possible, not on what is legal. Given the vast expansion of legal authority to collect and use data on American citizens over the past decade, the article rightly looks at what is possible tomorrow based on the data of today, because what is legal tomorrow cannot be predicted accurately.

I entirely agree that the anger over the Snowden revelations should be first directed at the US congressmen responsible for authorizing these programs in the first place. However, much of what they authorized wasn't even public information until Snowden came along, so your argument that we should not worry much about the infrastructure of the surveillance state because the laws of that state prohibit such surveillance is undermined by the enormous secrecy with which it operates. We don't even know how some intelligence agencies interpret the laws that have been written. In an environment filled with so much legal uncertainty, knowing what is technologically possible, and knowing what the incentives surrounding that technology are, is extremely valuable.