The US citizens have just learned that their government has access to records of all their phone conversations. Did you know about it before Tim Clemente revealed it. Which odds would you have put a year ago on the US government having that capability?

That's been somewhere between a persistent rumor and an open secret for a while, at least among those that follow security or privacy issues at all; Clemente's announcement slightly increased my estimate of its probability, but it's still hovering somewhere in the "plausible but not certain" range depending on how cynical I feel and some uncertainties about the technical side of things. I haven't done the math on the kind of storage and computing power it would take, and it's not unheard of for security insiders to announce capabilities that they can't actually cash out in practice (Bruce Schneier for one is skeptical). A year ago I would have said much the same, adjusted a bit for more expensive hardware per unit capability.