Wayne,

worked in telecom for about 27 years. I remember my first job in 1982. There were hooks/procedure calls in the code that few new what they did. In around 1983 I was in a four man cubicle. One of the guys, that worked on this code, said I think we all know by now that its for the NSA. All three of the rest of us said one after the other that we did not know. After that he turned beet red. Learned later that one of the other guys said they were not even to suppose to use NSA in sentence when they talked. This has been going on for quite some time. I belive google keeps all the links one clicks on for 1.5 years and then compressions them for almost forever. Therefore, every thing we do on line is stored.

Just watched on HBO or Showtime the move on J. Edgar Hoover and in the movie he mentions that he has an ageement with the Pres to not have a warrant to tap someones phone calls, and that is a million years ago.

I can tell you there are some other contries that are even more intursive on tapping their peoples phone calls and the data they collect. I can say that normally you need a Warrant-ID from a judge to tap a call. You need this to imput into the swithes database. I am only guessing, but I get the feel that the Patriot act may go around this. Just guessing.