How right you are ...
I have people tell me that it wouldn't do the nsa any good to capture all the data because they could never sift through it. ...
and right now that is true ...
but they know it will be a short time before they have the computing power to sift it effectively.
They have been storing data for future “mining” for years.
We live in interesting times.
Did you ever delve deeply into the technical capabilities of that EP-3 that was captured by China several years ago? It seems it was transcribing conversations between high officials, and even labeling each side of the conversation to show who said what. The text recordings were saved in both Chinese and English. If they can pack that into a plane, imagine what can be done with acres of computers.