Worse spying than we knew...

[spindrifter]

Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report

snip...

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials (current and former government employees) said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.

snip...

What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.

snip...

A former technology manager at a major telecommunications company said that since the Sept. 11 attacks, the leading companies in the industry have been storing information on calling patterns and giving it to the federal government to aid in tracking possible terrorists.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/24/politics/24spy.html
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So, it is actually much, much worse than we had ever dreamed--and the private telecom people are storing this data--what happens if they are hacked in to and the stuff gets disseminated to whomever...?