1984

About 90% of American households own a phone. There are over 200 million of them. The average cell phone owner talks for 12 minutes a day. Americans use 1.1 Extabytes of data on their cell phones each year, and send over 2 trillion text messages.
To store the phone calls and data from one year alone would require over 1 yotabyte of storage space.
The facility in Utah that is being run by the NSA is capable of handling data at these scales, if reports are to be believed.
So to the government employee that is undoubtedly reading this:
Doesn't it bother you that you are supporting a police state? We know the information being gathered is being used wrongly for political gain. Why are you supporting this?

To everyone else: begin encrypting everything. There are so many cheap ways to encrypt your stuff. Even if the government has the computing power to break the encryption, it takes time and computer power. Lots of it. If everyone, or even a significant percentage of people, began using encryption, there would not be enough computer power to handle the data.

Free hard disk encryption
Zfone telephone encryption
Hushmail for email

Symantec now owns the PGP technology. I don't know, and have no way of checking, if the government has inserted back doors into the software.

Here is a great article on this.