Come on guys, feeling anything but some kind of weird adoration and pride at the state of Anglo-Saxon sigint is irrational and unpatriotic. ![Smiley :)](https://www.eevblog.com/forum/Smileys/default/smiley.gif)
For one, even if you aren't a US citizen, if you're a Westerner, or otherwise a member of a secular, West-friendly nation, then all this technology goes into your safety.
Also, if you are still pissed off about the stuff spies do these days, there's not much you can do about it, is there? So just enjoy the show and stay out of criminal conspiracies. ![Wink ;)](https://www.eevblog.com/forum/Smileys/default/wink.gif)
What?! Are you serious?
Hmm... I don't think this forum is suitable for the reply I'd like to make. Especially since geoffs is playing delete-undelete-delete games again. Now one post I made in this thread and he deleted is restored, but his announcement of that deletion and my reply to him are deleted. Gee, and I wasn't even rude. Ah well, you know where to see it.
Anyway, to address the "It's all for your safety" point, no it isn't. It's mostly about commercial industrial espionage. For instance this report:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/26/edward-snowden-nsa-industrial-sabotage Edward Snowden tells German TV that NSA is involved in industrial espionage.
This has been going on for decades. Even back when the 'big secret' snooping program was called Echelon, which involved NATO countries capturing and analyzing all the comms they could. (Which was about 98% of all electronic comms, including domestic and international traffic, and I have that figure from someone who worked as head of a high level Sydney branch Intercepts Division.) In 2001 the French/European government held an inquiry into Echelon, and concluded that the US was using Echelon as a tool of industrial espionage against French economic interests. Bear in mind that France was/is a member of NATO, and Echelon was _supposed_ to be a NATO security system.
Btw, the current vagueness over whether the NSA captures phone voice conversations, or just the call records, is disinformation. Even back in 2001 the spy agencies were automatically in real time running ALL voice traffic through voice to text then keyword searches. For the keywords Echelon used a system of 'dictionaries', in which each NATO member provided a list of terms of interest, then these were combined into one dictionary which was distributed to all intercept sites. To get around the legal issues in each member country, the intercept sites in each country were declared foreign diplomatic areas, ie in (say) London the sites would be US or German diplomatic ground. When conversations of interest were captured, the Echelon system would forward them to local national authorities as diplomatic intelligence. 'Information received from a friendly foreign nation' - no legal problems.
Another detail was that any communication that got a dictionary keyword hit, regardless of whether later human analysis decided it was significant or not, was stored *permanently*. It's hard to imagine how much stuff there must be in that store by now.
Our taxes at work, 'protecting' us. Sigh.
"there's not much you can do about it, is there? So just enjoy the show and stay out of criminal conspiracies."
Pfft.
Oh, I'm not sure of your intention. Do you mean the (solidly established) unconstitutional spying activities are criminal, or acts of opposing them are criminal?