Google and The NSA Connection

Google and The NSA Connection

I am surprised that there is, suddenly, all this panic about phone companies giving access to data and Internet companies doing the same thing. It has been going on for decades.
When phone calls and faxes (remember them?) started to be routed via satellites,after Telstar and others were launched,commercially, all of the data could be farmed from the thin air, through which the beeps travelled. There were three sites in the original Echelon game. Pine Gap,Australia, Fylingdale in England and the puzzle palace at Fort Meade USA. They could capture all the data going up, down and across, from any communications satellite.Initially financial dealers thought that the speed was a bonus,via sats, but then realised that it could be grabbed out of the air. They then went back to undersea cables. Now we have submarines tapping these cables!!
So if the commercial World can get all the data that they need,at a price, why should Governments not have access to the same data,for free?.