That's quite a claim. Right now the NSA holds privileged information for millions of Americans. What happens if one of those people becomes some populist political entity. It would be trivial for the NSA to leak dirt of any kind (sexual fetishes, hangups, private emails to wife, other private things that when taken to the public would look bad, trash talking others, etc) to help discredit this person. Imagine that this person ran on a platform for cutting down the NSA or reforming the intelligence agencies. How "protected" do you think this "metadata" would be?

The Chinese wouldn't do that to me. They don't have a dog in this fight.