Not exactly. Gov had to be selective because its surveillance required a lot of resources per person/call. New technology allows it cheap and en mass. Voice calls can be recorded, then converted to text, then filtered. And humans will only analyze something of interest. Like we did have alphabet and books, and newspapers for hundreds of years. But only with internet we got the ability to process them easily.
Not only converted to text, it seems likely that we can document sentiment around the persons speech. For example if you're a low priority target that's still on the radar, but not high enough on the list to get a human handler I could see something like, not only what you said, but were you laughing, angry, crying. The the tone of your voice indicate the likelihood of action in a short time frame?
> Gov had to be selective because its surveillance required a lot of resources
not exactly. Where do you think all those budget trillions that don't have to be accounted for goes into? the FBI+NSA (=CIA but for citzens) have infinite resources.
All the overhead they have is to make sure a small subset of the citizens are not impacted. Snowden goes into this in some detail when talking about day to day operations. The norm is to extend the net as wide as possible, until you reach some politician or government agency.
