[DanBC]

Even though we had pretty thorough proof of this with ECHELON? Including the EU parliamen report into echelon; and the stuff about the US using it to provide commercial advantage to their aerospace industry?

Risk assessment has always been part of security. And people have always said that you should probably assume a well funded government can and does read everything. This was more of an assumption, but the fact that governments do listen to everything should not have been a surprise.

[comrade1]

No, not really with ECHELON. That would have required all phone calls in the u.s. to be routed outside of the u.s., and really the only cooperating country was the UK, even though Canada was part of the group. It wasn't practical to route all communications from the u.s. through the UK, and it probably would have been noticed.