It seems to me that people think monitoring means "in real time". It does not. It just means "recording". The government records (or it would if it had the mone

It seems to me that people think monitoring means "in real time". It does not. It just means "recording". The government records (or it would if it had the money) all telephone conversations. It does not listen to them nor index them nor transcribe them nor even scan them for keywords. It just records. From any number to any number. All the time. The tapes are kept indefinitely. If someone becomes a suspect in something, all phone conversations he was party to can be played back, either by humans or a computer that can transcribe, cross-index, identify other people by their voice, etc., whatever the technology permits. Same for all IP packets, if they had the budget. When they have a lead or reason to find something about you, e.g. you work for the minority party or are an actual dissident or slept with a cop's ex-wife, they comb through everything and find something you did that may not even be illegal but would be embarrassing. No humans need to be involved in storing the voice data on tape, and automatic transcription and cross-indexing only ever needs to be performed for a few phone numbers which are under investigation. But once someone becomes a suspect, all his history can be played back in order to, for example, discover his accomplices. There are scenarios which demonstrate how this can be useful and can save lives. I imagine these scenarios were used by the fascists to get the government to allow this. It goes like this: In a system in which wiretapping is only allowed by court order after law enforcement has probable cause, wiretapping a suspect's phone could be too late - he's either dead (law enforcement first got interested in him after discovering his body) or learned enough to not talk about his activity on the phone. But back when he was getting started he made mistakes. With conversations recorded before law enforcement ever heard of him, those mistakes can be exploited.