Ever heard of Echelon?
In the 80s and beyond, all electronically transmitted messages were recorded and analyzed. Worldwide.
We had an agreement with Britain, Germany, Australia, etc to not record the conversations of our own citizens, but to report to each other if anything nefarious was happening in our partners nations. That avoided the charges of spying on our own.
Sound familiar?
Back when this site began and I had my original username, we enjoyed throwing lots of the keywords used in those searches as our signature on posts, in the hopes of overwhelming them with data. Yeah, a waste of time. But fun.