Why are they scary? Are people's private conversations in their homes scary, too? Are private meetups scary?
I feel like people have by default fallen for the government propaganda and they don't even realize it.
What's next? Putting a chip that can monitor everyone's thoughts in real-time to prevent school shootings? Would the cops even be able to filter through thousands of such thoughts on a daily basis and take action against the most "real" thought? Or would they be flooded by data and not know what to do with it and how to act, and only act after the fact anyway?
Remember for virtually all of the terrorist attacks in the past 15 years, the authorities were already well aware of the attackers' history. Some had even been arrested before and released.
None of these surveillance laws is the right solution to those types of problems. Those problems have other fundamental causes that create them (economic policy, education policy, healthcare policy, etc).
And the governments know that, too. But such laws have other much bigger benefits for them, such as the ability to spy on any single person that they feel has slighted them in some way at will, so they can destroy that person's life. They care about passing surveillance laws for this reason way more than what they say the reason is in public. Another benefit is spying on individuals for economic benefits, too, such as stealing other countries' or foreign company's trade secrets, etc. But of course you're never going to hear them preach new surveillance laws for those reasons.