Being a former IT admin, I know enough to know that anyone with a little knowledge can eves drop on anything electronic. This is nothing new. The government as been doing this for decades, even before the commercial Internet. AT&Ts network was basically a giant “telephone bug” where the government can monitor anything, anywhere, anytime since the 1960’s.
It was one of the reasons why AT&T had a monopoly in the first place given to them by the government. AT&T has over 900 massive data centers across the United States, and thousands of smaller ones. Everything you or I do, crosses that network, even if you don’t have AT&T for anything. We are all “customers” so to speak.
We were using dumb terminals distributed throught the plant so that info could get from manufacturing to accounting much faster. But it was a bit glitchy and would log a person off randomly.
One could also write BASIC programs if they wished.
So I self taught myself BASIC and wrote a program that simulated IDENTICALLY the login screen.
What folks ACTUALLY got was my program that was sitting in a loop; waiting for them to enter their password.
After grabbing it and storing it, it then typed some random gibberish and logged off; which then brought up the REAL login screen.