The Police State - oops, I mean Deep State - tapes all of us all the time. They only listen if they ‘need’ to... and if they want to entertain themselves or damage a political opponent.
These are scary times. Much worse then most of us thought.
There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Folks ain't laughin no mo.
ALPR’s (automatic lic plate readers) along roadways, surveillance drones, Alphabet soup spying on internet/phone/CCard records, fake cell towers (gleaning cell phone data), TSA/DHS body searches, Digital photos/thumb prints on state DLs incorporated into bio-metric data bases...such as facial recognition, alarming increase in swat raids from a few thousand a decade ago to over 85K nationwide.
America is becoming an effin police state.