" Don't they need a wire tap to monitor me?"...well, not exactly, Mary...it depends. If 'they' know certain things about you...your email, your ISP, your Social Security #, your credit card #...etc., they could follow a lot of what you do easily. And *If* they decide you are worth monitoring, real experts can do amazing tricks!...........remember a few years back when they caught that famous hacker who was an expert at NOT being monitored? It took awhile, but they tracked him down. I think the latest proposal is a plan to make that sort of tracking a bit easier.

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"the sheer volumn of E-Mails and internet browsing, even if automated, should kill any meaningfull moinitoring."

piffle! What do you think the CIA and NSA are doing to look for useful data right now? They don't of course, get everything, and clever spies use encrypted messages anyway, but they can learn things from the timing and source of traffic, even when they can't read the content.

With supercomputers and a few known facts, they can get reams of stuff, and winnow it down and learn a lot.....(the program to search the spectrum for possible alien broadcasts is based on looking for meaningful patterns in billions of lines of data---it would be even easier if they knew what patterns would be most useful and likely)