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Among those of us who were in the industry back in the Clinton administration, hell yes it was widely known.

I was there when the CALEA BS came in the front door, and I remember how we in engineering got rather hot under the collars about this BS.

The total surveillance society has been in the making for years now, and it started with CALEA.

BTW, the issue of recording all the phone calls in the US isn’t nearly as daunting as some of these liberal arts majors scribbling their gasbag columns and op-ed pieces would have people believe. First, phone usage for voice calls has been dropping in the US for years. The younger generations would rather type out War and Peace on their stupid phones, 140 characters at a time, than make an actual phone call for two minutes and get the point they’re trying to communicate over and done with. Snagging SMS messages is pud-easy, and very low bandwidth.

All you need to do is look at the pricing plans on cellular and landline phones now to see where the money is: in data services. My most recent phone plan is “unlimited voice in CONUS” and unlimited texting. Data? There’s a cap per month on my plan, and going over that cap costs serious money. That tells us that the phone companies have surplus voice bandwidth that isn’t being used. They’re trying to encourage people to make voice calls. When I was a kid, people would break their shin to run across the house when a relative called “long distance!”

OK, so we have declining voice usage. Now start thinking like the NSA. You start by eliminating all marketing calls from boiler rooms. Poof, there’s a huge chunk of voice bandwidth gone at once. Then you can eliminate calls to voicemail. You can get that data sent to you by the carriers, no need to get it twice.

Then you start thinking about what to keep from the rest of the trawl. Obviously, all off-shore calls are kept. Then you start by keeping calls to/from financial institutions, because not much happens in the world without money. Then you can decide whether or not to ditch calls between Fortune-1000 companies - because what’s the odds that someone is going to do something really interesting on company time? Not as much.

Suddenly, you have a much more manageable trawl: Limited numbers of land-line & cell phones, SMS traffic, data to email servers, etc.

OK, now you want to target people of interest. Scope up all the phone traffic of every reporter in the US. Every elected official, the entire local/state/federal bureaucracy, the judiciary. The national labs. If they’re even pretending to look for terrorism, they’d put a priority on the traffic of every engineering department at every college or university - and then for good measure, they could scarf up all the traffic of every engineer and physics jock in the country.

At this point, we’re probably not up to 15 million people, all told. What people forget in this NSA flap is that there are vast numbers of people who simply don’t matter. The course of the country, much less human civilization, would not change a whit if they were to drop dead today.

And then here’s the best part: The problem of analyzing this data is one that lends itself very well to parallel processing - MIMD style (cluster) processing. Perfect for today’s models of racks of server blades of multi-core CPU’s.

Want to speed it up? Start laying in blades of ASIC’s or FPGA’s to do address or stateful packet inspection and re-creation of TCP sessions.

I’ve worked on products that did stateful intrusion detection that was a blade in a router. 10+ years ago, we could do intrusion detection (ie, looking for a pattern of bytes in a re-assembled TCP session) on a 16GB/s switch backplane with a mediocre (by today’s standards) dual-CPU Intel x86 chip and a little help from an ASIC. Today? Pfah. Pour the data bandwidth on... Noooo problem.

Having been “in the comm business” gives me a completely different perspective than the people defending the NSA. I demand that they prove that the NSA ISN’T doing it - because I know it *is* technically possible. Give me enough money and I can do the job with commercial, off-the-shelf hardware. No spooky high-end custom silicon projects, no black-ops wiretapping, etc necessary. The interfaces are there, the technology is there, the CPU, memory and disk bandwidth are all there, for the asking in the commodity computing market. You just need the “purchase order that never stops” to start buying rack upon rack of server blades, discs, gigabit ethernet interfaces, switches, etc.

But now we find that the NSA didn’t even bother with physical taps in some cases, they paid off the commercial aggregators of private data to do the bundling and collection for the NSA, then put them under NDA and called it “done.”

Give me a compliant Congress stupid enough to give me a black budget without any accountability, and furthermore, a Congress filled with lawyers and liberal arts graduates? Oh yea, I’ll have this done without any problem. The people in Congress will be simply too stupid to realize what I’ve just had them approve. That includes “conservatives” in Congress as well. There’s only, what, nine engineers in the whole Congress? And many of those are CivE’s and MechE’s, and a bunch of them were obviously not that hot as engineers because they went on to get MBA’s and law degrees. There are no pure techies in Congress who could listen to the NSA testimony in open or closed session and then start grilling these clowns with intelligent questions that give the NSA nowhere to run, nowhere to hide but the Fifth Amendment.