I'm gonna try really hard to not go over the line of the recent rule about too much negativity, but this line of
questioning/reasoning really pisses me off. I see it quite a bit on reddit/twitter too. As a matter of fact, one time Jacob Appelbaum asked why people do it and my response was that it seems like a variation on the loaded question fallacy. Implies "you should have expected X", therefore attempting to avoid actual discussion, or shifting of the discussion via the overton window.
It's just such a useless statement. "Why is this a surprise?"
Well, first of all, I'm sure there are plenty of people who might not have had any idea cell data was being used this way and on this scale. Second, I'm willing to bet of the many who might have had a vague idea, this gives a more concrete background with rough numbers to solidify the idea. Third, It's not a surprise to those of us who have been paying attention, but the problem is when we have said something in the past it almost invariably has been ignored or dismissed as paranoid or crazy... At least until a good story or leak comes out and gets enough attention to grab enough media mindshare. Edward Snowden was a classic example of this at work. Sure, many of use knew about tempest and echelon and five-eyes, knew about cell tower metadata issues via watching ownership of said towers. Everytime with few exceptions though, publicly stating these things got us called "conspiracy theorists".
Maybe you just use this as a rhetorical and are one of us that have been paying attention, but this statement is not condusive whatsoever to intellectual discussion of a subject, and we need to address it's fallacy when we see it because it's too pervasive.