> Almost all public activity generates a paper trail, and before the internet, your phone company, bank, grocery store, even your VHS rentals and public library

> Almost all public activity generates a paper trail, and before the internet, your phone company, bank, grocery store, even your VHS rentals and public library, were keeping records on you. The internet makes it far far more efficient, but it didn't invent the collection of such records. In addition to efficient, it also made it more convenient and secure to do so. This aspect is huge. The local video tape rental place may have kept records of every movie you rented, but an agency wasn't going to go in and demand your records from the scumbag owner unless it had a really pressing reason to, as it would potentially blow their investigation/operational security. Scumbag owner would have some guys in dark suits visit him and it'd be all over town in a matter of hours. The end result is that they probably wouldn't sift through your rental records. Now, with the proliferation of the Internet, the government doesn't even need active participation of the records custodian, they can pull traffic off the wire and warehouse it themselves. And if it does require active participation from the data custodian, they have nice National Security Letters with highly-threatening gag orders, which have proven to be quite effective.