It's really disturbing how 'it's just metadata' is one of the lines being used to make the whole NSA debacle sound like not such a big deal, when in reality metadata is what makes this information USEFUL.
My point was that phone records is often used as a distraction from the rest of the programs, "see look, it's just the outside of a letter!".
In reality, two things are wrong: a lot of letters' insides are analyzed as well, and keeping a central database of just the outsides turns out to be a huge privacy violation, anyway.
Phone records! Just metadata collection! Data collection? Oh, right, we do that, too.