Trying to be as charitable as possible to anyone who says they don't need to fear surveillance, I don't believe it is because they think the innocent have nothing to fear, but because the sufficiently uninteresting have nothing to fear. Dissident journalists and political activists may be in the right morally and possibly even legally in some countries, but governments nonetheless have quite a tremendous incentive to surveil, imprison, stop, and possibly kill them. That is still not the case for an average citizen.
Trying to get people to care about stuff by convincing them it might someday directly impact them personally seems like a fool's errand to me. Even wars and genocides don't directly impact the vast majority of people, often even in the countries where they're happening. We instead need to figure out how to get people to care about bad things happening to other people. The case needs to be made to fight for freedom and against surveillance even if you're completely certain it will never impact you.
I think half the comments in this thread are missing this point. The story at hand isn't mass surveillance like in the post-9/11 days. It's not the kind of dragnet that will scoop your grocery list and netflix habits while looking for Al Qaeda. It's very much targeted surveillance. The problem is who they are targeting and why. And they seemingly are targeting people serving public interests. Some of whom ended up dead. Jamal Khashoggi wasn't going to come to Thankgiving at my house or anything, but his reporting on the corruption in the Saudi government was making the world a better place by whatever little margin he could push the needle. And really, as much as the surveillance is crap, it does belie the point that he was also physically murdered. A point that didn't generate a lot of sympathy from the leader of the US despite him actually having a personal connection.
Trying to get people to care about stuff by convincing them it might someday directly impact them personally seems like a fool's errand to me. Even wars and genocides don't directly impact the vast majority of people, often even in the countries where they're happening. We instead need to figure out how to get people to care about bad things happening to other people. The case needs to be made to fight for freedom and against surveillance even if you're completely certain it will never impact you.