Never heard of Echelon?

Folks over as MSNBC seem to be agog over some touchingly antique news indeed, namely the barely interesting information that NSA "eavesdrops" on every American, terrorist connections or not.

This old hat has been passé for decades. It's the logical extension of the old ECHELON program which listened to wireless telephony and categorized the raw input by scanning for key words and phrases in the alphabet soup.

One trusts the President's Blackberry is slightly more secure than your average Firefox "encrypted transaction" business website. Technically, this stuff is so easy I wonder if the entire story isn't some of kind of misdirection?

I dunno what you think of hardened Blackberries, but I want one! What a neat toy.