Please from the beginning I want to ask you, if you want to participate in this thread don't start with pure paranoia and let's just discuss facts about what we really know and NOT how we believe it would be.

The topic of this thread will be online/phone/life privacy.

I just stumbled across a news article in a local newspaper that presented an interview with a former member of the "security" and explaining how were the phones listened before '89.

To give you a background on this. Before '89, my country was a communist country, and the leader, to be sure everything was working exactly as he planned he had some kind of secret services called the "security". The point of this "security" was to maintain the order and to reduce to silence whoever was against the "great leader".

Okay, and he started saying how they would listen and record some of the telephone conversations. They also mentioned that they needed warranty to listen, and they would not record anything, because they would record on tapes, and whenever the operator thought it was something important they would press record.

Okay this sounded so rightful and correct until he told a story that he tought it was funny, intentionally or not, giving away some vital information that contradicted everything that he said before. Until this moment he said that he would only listen if that person was connected with another person, and it wouldn't record only important stuff. He said that he received a warranty to follow a woman that was supposed to get in contact with a man that was marked as a threat. This man was this woman's son. And they said that they heard on the line something like this "Oh my son, you came home!". The "security" was alerted and when they broke in that woman's home they saw that the woman was sleeping and sleep talking.

What's the conclusion. Before and in '89 they had the technology to listen and record a phone without being connected.

Today it's 2013, the technology we use is very advanced and I am afraid to think what kind of tech does this kind of "security" around the world, in every state. Today we are a democratic state, but we still have some sort of "security" that we are conscious that they are constantly monitoring everything we do, from wired home phones to cell phones and internet.

Now, set of question is:

What are they doing with the stored information?
How are they filtering various persons (let's say that these persons are actually bad guise and they have a warrant to follow them, and this other bunch of people are just a probem for the president, because we all know the power of politics, even in a democratic state)?
Are there devices out there that can't be remotely activated?
Are there devices untraceable?

As a final note, I think you probably all heard that US secret agencies managed to break into TOR and completely compromise it. The administrator of the biggest TOR hosting server was arrested. TOR was supposed to be unbreakable and completely private to our current tech, and yet they managed to break it.