You guys are just catching onto this
now?
Forget the USA; those bastards have been listening in on pretty much every wireless transmission made anywhere in the
world for decades. edit: What the hell am I saying? The were tapping all wired phones as well, going back to the 50's or maybe even earlier. end edit: For the most part, it's computers with enough voice recognition ability to flag key phrases and start a recording that can be further analyzed by humans. Everything else is just stashed away without any attention paid to it. Now that the internet exists, they've gone completely off of the rails, adding e-mails and even search histories to their crap pile.
I first became aware of the NSA sometime in the early 70's, during a research binge for a book that I was writing. At that time, and probably still, the NSA had the largest computer system in the world, far dwarfing that of NASA, the Library of Congress, and all universities combined.
Around 1985 or so, I bought a used copy of a book called "The Puzzle Palace", subtitled "Inside the National Security Agency / America's Most Secret / Intelligence Organization"
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It was written by James Bamford, copyright 1982, but mine is the '83 edition.
That is one incredible eye-opener.
Since I detest US intrusion upon the rest of the world, I've made it a point since the 70's to occasionally mention plutonium or Blue Light or the Feathermen or even some stuff that I make up that sounds suspicious when speaking to friends on the phone, just so that some idiot at the NSA gets knocked out of his nap by a computer telling him that there's a terrorist on the line.
)