Other than the Guardian the G20, GCHQ, NSA findings have hardly been covered. I'm most surprised by the BBC, even if they did get a DA-notice I would have expected them to be somewhat impartial.
It makes me feel angry and powerless.
"UK government puts editor in jail for one of employees spying on a few dozen people. What punishment do they get for spying on a billion?"
The Government are working within the law... the press was not. Also all to combined government computing power in the UK couldn't analyse the amount of data the government would have to work through if it "spied" and analysed everything that went across any network. Classic case of "big data" analysis - parse all the data in motion, pull off the things of interest, discard the rest.
This is EDIT not correct.
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b02xxvbr)
0833 Sir Malcom Rifkind, a former foreign secretary and the current chairman of the commons intelligence and security committee, and Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, analyse allegations that GCHQ has snooped on web information.
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-23059065)(http://www.b...
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23004080)
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23048259)
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23017108)
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23051248)
etc etc etc.
> Why aren't the government being hauled over the coals for this thing?
There's no evidence that GCHQ are doing anything illegal, nor anything new. They've been doing this for many years. It's what they say they do. It's what they're set up to do.
GCHQ having a 3 day cache of communication-content data is little different to telecoms companies keeping a similar cache[1] except the laws are clearer about what GCHQ can and can't do with the data.
In terms of privacy violation there are much worse examples than GCHQ slurping everything. Corrupt public officials (eg: police officers) selling off information to newspapers; workers for telecoms companies having unauthorised access; people with access to medical records gossiping.
Note that the broader collection you mention is, at the moment, just "meta data" (routing information), and not content data. I guess while not be acceptable it is less unacceptable than collecting content data. (If that makes sense.)