I believe that the size of the database mentioned by Steve is off by at lease 2 orders of magnitude. Yes, two orders of magnitude. I know this from experience from working at a CLEC (a competing telco after deregulation). We were small, maybe a few million phone numbers. Our database table for completed (billed) phone calls was on the order of 1.6 billion rows ! We only kept 3 months of this detailed information online. The remainder was archived. This was just call billing information that was fixed and one could 'optimize' the 9's. I just cannot fathom how the government could even attempt to store, and better yet analyze this volume of data. Could you imagine, tables with trillions of rows ? Oh, and lest we forget our 'blobs. This is all of the digitized (recorded) phone calls. At lease one per call record. Then what about breaking this down (parsing) the digitized conversation into words for further analysis ? Soon trillions turns into quadrillions and quintillions. I just do not see how this information could be gathered, loaded and analyzed in any reasonable fashion to where it could provide any 'proactive' value.