Even in those times, it was realized that there are 300,000,000 Americans. That there was no way that any techonology, including today's, could begin to monitor

Even in those times, it was realized that there are 300,000,000 Americans. That there was no way that any techonology, including today's, could begin to monitor any but the crudest details about all the traffic so many generate. That such an insurmountable problem can be made even harder with encryption, phoney identities, phoney traffic, and dozens of counter-counter-measures. Let alone be privy to what we do and say 'out-of-range'. Only the monitoring computers have the time and patience to look at as much as they can ... and they can't parse text sentences (let alone voice comms) well enough to do anything but scrutinize for a few common terms ... let alone nuances (seen Google translate?). A couple of back-of-the-envelope calculations will demonstrate that to anyone. The agencies and the corporations know that but they refuse to cop to it, possibly because it's so obvious that all they can do is -pretend- to be able to monitor a significant fraction of it all. Maybe because pretending is the only hope they've got left.