From Cryptome.org, I found this a good point, and it’s something I’ve often thought about:
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One problem that most naive paranoid types completely fail to grasp is the titanic volume of modern communications. The flow is so overwhelming that only a powerful God could possibly process it all to find interesting material. The entire federal budget could not pay enough humans to screen and analyze ALL the electonic communications of even a medium size city in 2003. So communications intercepts are necessarily targeted very narrowly, even drag net fishing is likely done only in places where there is a real likelihood that something important will turn up with finite effort.
The notion that an all powerful big brother is listening to everything and capturing everything just is not realistic, and a very very high percentage of what does get captured is never looked at or listened to or even stored for very long.
Which of course is why traffic analysis and transaction analysis and social network discovery is far more important than flying airplanes around trying to collect incidental radiation from local copper T1 lines. Knowing who calls or emails who makes it possible to find the needles which you want to monitor in the vast haystacks. Thus there is a much greater probability that records of your calls and IP traffic addresses are looked at for patterns and association with known bad guys than that someone is actually listening to or reading your traffic looking for the word bomb.