>>51101740Yes. To keep this somewhat vtuber-related: Many of the things Pippa has ranted about are verifiable facts. Some are jokes, but like many good jokes, they're still an exaggeration of a truth. In theory, the US government usually can't legally spy on the communications of its own citizens, but they can spy on potential terror threats, and anyone suspected of communicating with potential terror threats, whether by phone or any other means. In practice, the justification needed to do so is dubious at best, and they can invent reasons, plant evidence on devices, and engineer terror situations that otherwise wouldn't have happened in order to "catch terrorists", which justifies their own existence, and lets them remove politically inconvenient people. This also goes for foreign citizens. Essentially, they're able to spy anyone and everyone, through various legal, "legal", and illegal means.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjrkCmwrPVAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOQn9bFMjbwhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnMMA75LUeUThe following terms are directly related to your question. I'm using Wikipedia because it's usually biased in favor of government-approved narratives. Read a bit and then ask yourself: If this is what the government will begrudgingly admit to, then what haven't they admitted to yet?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowdenhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISMhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agencyhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Acthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_EyesThe alphabet agencies are genuinely, unironically evil to their core, regardless of who's in the oval office at the moment. Search any of the terms in pic (un)related for interesting but unrelated reads.
>>51101912Also this, but not just OS makers. Private security, IT, and intelligence firms have a lot of options that government agencies don't, legally speaking, and much less oversight. The government just so happens to have lucrative contracts with them, which lets them "legally" do basically anything they want by proxy.
>>51104996They might have limited manpower to search through and interpret all collected data, but the systems passively collecting that data, which they can search through later if they so please, require almost no manpower at all. If retards on Twitter will search 10+ years of tweets to destroy someone for free, I'm sure the feds and their pets are fine with getting paid huge salaries to search 20+ years of your communications if you wittingly or unwittingly become a person of interest in the distant future. And given the kind of task that it is, with how AI is going, their manpower problem will be solved in the very near future, if it hasn't been already.