My favorite surveillance story is from WWII. A farmer in Virginia, outside of DC, invited a friend to dinner. The friend was in the Army Signal Corps.
The farmer turned on his SW radio, and said “Let’s see if we can pickup the Berlin taxi cab dispatchers today...”
Hope the farmer got full market value for his land, as the gub’mint took it over for surveillance and to install “real” antennas.
Good joke.
I liked the real life story of the Australian radio astronomy array that listened in on Apollo faking the astronauts’ conversation to impress visiting Americans.