Hm, I guess I don't know what you're referring to. I am mainly talking about NSLs, since that's what we know about, but that's an FBI thing - a relatively "open" agency, as these things go. I imagine the other three-letter agencies have their own versions whose existence is not yet on the record.<p>The very existence of the NSLs, however, kind of sweeps all these pleasant ideals of due process and transparency off the table. They're a legal warrant for any information whatsoever, can be signed and validated by any FBI field officer, and the recipient is legally obliged to keep the fact of their receipt a secret. There have been hundreds of thousands of such letters issued.<p>Better yet, the FBI has gotten sick of writing the letters, and the recipients know they have no chance of resisting giving up the information, so nowadays they're not even writing them. See the above article. And as a commenter on that piece writes, if you believe for one second that the FBI has mended its ways since 2007, I have a bridge to sell you.<p>There are no barriers whatsoever to law enforcement or national security services getting whatever data they want, whenever they want, with no oversight whatsoever. And if you extrapolate a little, taking into account developments such as the NSA's new $2b, 65MW data centre in Utah, I bet the intelligence agencies have full bulk data access and probably a replication of all major email and social networking providers' data for mining purposes.<p>I don't think any of this could be called a conspiracy theory any more. It's just the reality of world we live in. We might not know all the details yet, but the writing is very clearly on the wall. I congratulate your skepticism and lack of credulity - we sure need more of that in the world - but most or all of this is real and happening right now. The new system was called TIA, then it was called ADVISE. Its current codename is unknown, it was supposedly cancelled, but whaddya know, that data centre is still being built, and another similar facility in Texas. What do you think they're for?<p>Remember, ECHELON was a "conspiracy theory" too once. The very nature of classified activity is that we don't know all the details while it's going on. But we can sure connect the dots. And there's an awful lot of dots.