Here's what I know and it seems pretty obvious: if a subversive is looking to move information between him and his cohorts, they will make it nearly impossible for the NSA or any other national organization to either: 1) locate messages or if they do, 2) break them.
(Sorry, but unless the government has figured out a mathematical backdoor to standard RSA-style encryption, any nefarious organization can just add a few more bits to their encryption to stay ahead of the code-breakers and their hardware.)
I'm going to assume that real subversives are going to go to extreme lengths to ensure their communications aren't compromised.
The government isn't stupid, they know this. So who the heck are they listening to?
It leaves us with communications by folks who want to use their 1st amendment rights to talk about anything under the American sun, and will most often do it in clear-text as it passes through routing equipment.
The parsing and archiving of this type of information -- is what is truly scary:
"See this note you wrote to someone else in 2005 talking about 'overthrowing rabid monkeys', well you wrote it, so off to the dungeons you go! Muhaha!"
It is quite ironic that people here are all up to date with every social media trend du jour and talk of "social graphs" and link analysis of friending and tweets as if this whole field is somehow new and unexplored but never think for a moment that they are wandering through some very well-travelled territory. Traffic analysis is nothing new, they are very good at it, so even if the contents of the messages remain completely opaque it is still possible to get useful intel just by knowing who is talking to whom.
It sounds obvious to us, but maybe you overestimating the intelligence of the average suicidal terrorist.
For the high level people you are probably right. I'm sure the kingpins either never use phones and internet, or RSA encrypt everything.
However, I would think the low level terrorist grunts are occasionally going to make mistakes and talk about things they shouldn't on the phone with family and friends.
(Sorry, but unless the government has figured out a mathematical backdoor to standard RSA-style encryption, any nefarious organization can just add a few more bits to their encryption to stay ahead of the code-breakers and their hardware.)
I'm going to assume that real subversives are going to go to extreme lengths to ensure their communications aren't compromised.
The government isn't stupid, they know this. So who the heck are they listening to?
It leaves us with communications by folks who want to use their 1st amendment rights to talk about anything under the American sun, and will most often do it in clear-text as it passes through routing equipment.
The parsing and archiving of this type of information -- is what is truly scary:
"See this note you wrote to someone else in 2005 talking about 'overthrowing rabid monkeys', well you wrote it, so off to the dungeons you go! Muhaha!"