My CTRL+X finger has been too quick once again: an intelligence service
a) Is happy enough to intercept parts of traffic (no ref, but NSA is
purported to operate many gateway nodes)
b) NSA is perhaps _the_ largest customer for hot silicon vendors,
supercomputers and dedicated ASIC boxes included (yes, they can also
factor primes and do brute-force of several standard cryptosystems)
c) NSA is the world largest single employer of world-class
mathematicians/comp sci professionals
Phone & fax, apart from larger volume, require sophisticated pattern
matching. IP traffic? Easy as /pi.
Btw sniffers, as I recently learned car-mounted (handheld?) focused
cellphone ID interception devices has become available to the German
police. As all cellphone providers in Germany are legally obliged to
maintain surveillance capacity on any customers (the customers thus paying
for the extra hardware) -- and blanket authorisation for which is easy to
obtain, at least in Bavaria. At this very day a most draconic surveillance
legislation is being decided upon in the Bundestag. Being law-abiding
citizens, the Krauts seem to have bought the entire anti-crime shtick,
hook & all. Good night...
'gene