Err
Your mate is right. This has been going on for donkeys years.

Echelon

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echelon_%28signals_intelligence%29

I thought everyone knew about it.

Cheers
( Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Wed 7 Dec 2011, 12:05, 3 replies)

Yup,
old news.

Osama bomb 9/11 semtex banana skins
*waves to Echelon*
( monster munch person, man, woman... camera... TV?, Wed 7 Dec 2011, 12:56, closed)

Don't forget....
Carnivore as well, although it was smaller scale and more targeted apparently, and has now been superseded.
( repooc, Wed 7 Dec 2011, 13:24, closed)

It must have been well known for a while
It was mentioned in a "Professional Issues" lecture I went to as part of an engineering degree back in 2001 or 2002 as an example of data security that most people overlook. It appeared to be the only thing the lecturer had heard of since the glory days of IBM.

A year or two later the EU (or a similar European organisation) issued a report on how it was being used for industrial espionage and I suspect it took them a few years to put that together.

A more interesting conspiracy was Phorm: BT let a company called Phorm do deep packet inspection on some users' internet access and lied about it. I gather the aim was to improve targeting of adverts - the best bit for the tin foil hat brigade: one of the directors was Sir Norman Lamont, Baron of Lerwick.
( ElParrot, Wed 7 Dec 2011, 22:21, closed)