It's like that thread about a list of targeted words. I'm certain the government isn't just simply searching for those words. It's running algorithms to judge context, and you can be sure humans are only needed after the information is well sifted and sorted by computers. Plus, even if this isn't going on right now (I believe it is), it's getting easier by the day as computing power grows.
I think Norm mentioned the PS3. They are more powerful than supercomputers a decade or so ago. Anyone who doesn't think that technology is or will be used by government to monitor citizens is incredibly naive. As in 1984, technology offers the means to monitor citizens like never before, except there's no reason why the proles can't be included (1984 had humans monitoring humans).
Before my PS3 blew up (after 4 years of hard use ;) it was playing full hdmi resolution 3d games that were far more graphically advanced than movies 10 years ago. Nearly and in some cases photorealistic. That tech is 6 years old. The graphics cards (think math/number crunching operations) on a high end home gaming PC has 1000 times the power of a PS3.
Now think millions to billions of times that power in supercomputer clusters. That’s reality today and not even getting into the potential of quantum computers coming down the pike within a decade or two. Likely far less.
Aside from Skynet becoming self aware soon ;) we have no real way to hide thanks to the total integration of our lives and the online world. Even a hermit in the hills has to deal with spy sats/drones if someone wants to monitor him bad enough. But the causal/average person is an open book to even corporate entities, much less the govt.
It’s more scary to me to think there are people that don’t understand the level of surveillance already in play than that the govt. is doing it (not that that’s a good thing). What one does not know is always more a danger than what one does.
Now that I think about it, the PS2 was a banned item for Iraq under Saddam after it came out as it could be networked under linux and made into a cluster supercomp. There are pix/info on the net of a group that actually did that with racks of old PS2s.