Let's be clear about what the "FREEDOM Act" does. It does not make NSA Bulk Collection of phone data illegal. What it does is rearrange the laws and request process and more carefully enumerate and define procedures by which the NSA may acquire and query phone records that are stored in bulk.

It also focuses primarily on phone records and one phone record program. There are dozens of phone record programs and hundreds of different types of signals that are collected that are not subjects of the "FREEDOM Act".

Now (like it presumably was before) the NSA will not have full takes of all American phone records. They will force companies to keep these records for them though, and they will continue to have the ability to query them.

It doesn't matter if nobody is watching 99.5% of CCTV footage. If CCTVs watch every square inch of a city and record it for later possible inspection, that's surveillance. It does not matter if human analysts do not inspect 99.5% of the bulk data. It is still surveillance.

It was also surveillance when the KGB forced private citizens to keep tabs on one another. It does not matter whether it is Google, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, Dropbox, Facebook, and Comcast doing the surveillance on compulsion of the Fed. All of our data and communications are being stored and processed.

It is still, categorically, surveillance.