There has been considerable controversy over the alleged tapping of only "metadata" by your Big Brother in the NSA. The involves such questions as: what kind of information can they really obtain from metadata? Can they obtain private communication content as well? This blogger attempts to unravel these question with the evidence available so far from our friendly Big Brother.
This metadata is useful to find connections between people, to reconstruct where they have been when and to find out about certain habits of the people involved.
But the content of the calls may be much more interesting.It seems reasonable to assume that the NSA uses algorithms to screen metadata to pick up suspicious content. (Of course, what constitutes suspicious content is any content which our ruling class defines as adversely affecting their interests.) Then future content of communications is directly accessed from that suspect's digital forms of communication.