Woke up this morning to find out the Government has my phone records...

[alcibiades_mystery]

64. Well, yes, of course...I was joking

This is clearly a "big data" / "find patterns" operation, as is much data collection. The idea of the big bad government drilling down into everyone's petty and inconsequential affairs (no pun intended) is just silly: a silly view of government, a silly view of surveillance, and a silly view of even basic resources. Anyone who has seen the government in action knows that they have neither the resources nor concern to attend to every individual's private foibles. Hell, Tsarnaev the Elder was basically flagged as a terrorist and was posting radical Jihadi videos to fucking YouTube, and they did nothing but interview him.

Here's the basic rule of thumb for people living in paranoid fantasy world: yes, the government no doubt collects all manner of information about you, but it is done in tranches with information about tens of MILLIONS of others. Billions of pieces of data. That collection is run through algorithms (if the government is lucky) to detect patterns, maybe. Nobody gives a shit about YOUR information. There is a kind of odd inflation of the self to think that MY conversations are the ones "the government" is monitoring out of the billions of pieces of data they collect. More cult of the individual nonsense. No. They monitor conversations in the aggregate, a wholly different thing. Can they theoretically drill down to MY conversation? Of course. That's how all database logic works. But nobody cares to do it. I'm not that important. And neither are you. It's the aggregate that counts.