WHY IS IT WATCHING YOU?
This is one of those rare cases where the government doesn’t pretend it’s spying on you for your own safety. If the government has started tapping your phone conversations and web traffic, it doesn’t care about your safety, it thinks you’re a threat. Even the NSA’s enormous warrantless wiretapping program was—so they say—intended to pick terrorists out of the crowd and focus intelligence-gathering efforts on them. But historically, terrorists and even criminals are in the minority when it comes to who the government chooses to spy on.
The government considers wiretaps a tool to use against its own enemies, not the enemies of the people. Government taps are all too often focused on people it considers a threat to its hold on power—antiestablishment activists, nosy reporters, political opponents.
Conversely, corporations use telephone monitoring in an attempt to improve your experience. Customer service calls are recorded to ensure that call-center operators stick to the script they’re given and to make tweaks and improvements when necessary. Very little research data is gathered. It is one of the very few interactions you’ll ever have with a large corporation in which market research data is not actively mined. Relish it.
Anyone else who’s tapping your phone or web traffic is doing so because you have something they want. You could be the target of a sophisticated con, the subject of a stalker or serial killer, or the victim of an abusive significant other.