Would calling someone from a payphone (coin) box still baffle the intelligence gathering departments like in The Sopranos for instance ?

Just asking...

Hugo Rifkind's piece in today's Times is good, if you have access.

But it's just another step on an increasingly slippery slope, isn't it? If we all just accept that the world's governments can monitor who we're contacting, when we contact them and for how long, we're then only one step away from routine monitoring of the content of our communications as well.

You're possibly right, I see it more as merely adjusting the surveillance as we've adjusted our means of communications though. But that next step is the vital one, and shouldn't be undertaken without (relatively) open debate. That again comes to the crux of it for me, we don't know what they can do and what they can't do and we don't know who is supposed to be monitoring and policing them. As DaveO wrote, its the lack of accountability that is the major issue in my opinion.

Yep, along with the vilification of immigrants and Islam from certain groups and media outlets. As you say, the same kind of people who vehemently oppose, or say they do, the secret power of the state as evidenced by the Stasi etc. The same kind of people who will be strongly in favour of the death penalty. The same kind of people who would demand monitoring of people who look at any kind of pornography or anything "obscene" in case they might be paedophiles.
Ironically they're generally the first to defend Britain as a bastion of freedom and tolerance, yet that British culture is being destroyed by allowing the freedom of foreigners to enter the country and the tolerance to allow them to practise their own religion or culture.
Hypocritical idiots, I generally call them. Or Daily Mail readers for short.

Perhaps I'm just inherently less trusting than you are. Your other point is sound, though: if what they're doing is necessary and proportionate, why the secrecy? And if they're being secretive about this, what else don't we know?

I don't think it is in that in the old physical world the only communications monitored would be those of people suspected of being involved in some criminal or terrorist activity.

Even information such as where innocent people go on the Internet and who they contact via email coming out could have serious implications for the individual in their personal and working lives. Provided it isn't illegal it's no ones business where people go or who they talk to.

So for me the blanket capturing of information even if the content isn't read is still going too far. You should always need probable cause to track anything about anyone.

Then you need to add suitable checks and balances on top of only acting with probable cause to make sure that isn't abused.

Well its certainly stirred a few things up:

[urlhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/12/anger-mounts-congress-telephone-surveillance-programmes[/url

Particularly interesting the EU has got involved whereas our own government doesn't think there is an issue.

Snowden had been fired for "violations of the firm's code of ethics"."

Who says Americans don't do irony.

There's also the financial implications surrounding the storage of e-traffic. Government has said that it is the responsibility of the service provider to store this information, the service providers reckon it will be at a huge cost. Guess who will be paying.

All a load of nonsense. I personally don't care one bit if the authorities are watching every single thing I do like a hawk. I don't do anything that would interest them anyway, so what on earth is the fuss about?

If doing this saves one life, let alone a few hundred thousand, why not go for it.

So you have never done anything, ever, on-line that could possibly compromise your job or personal life even slightly? Never viewed any naughty pictures

? What about details of your finances? Happy for details of those to be kept or monitored in cased you start donating to Al-Qaeda?

Now you may not do any of that but that doesn't mean all the data held about you won't find it's way out into the open or be shared with organisations that have nothing to do with anti-terrorism. In fact it's almost guaranteed someone if not many people will have such details exposed.

They won't have broken any laws but details of their financial circumstances, what sites they look at on-line , even details such as to their sexuality which is no ones business but theirs will be exposed and this can have a serious impact on their lives.

The last government wanted to increase the time you could be held without charge to 3 months. If a future government re-introduced that and then this mine of information meant you got detained due to a case of mistaken identity (which has happened to people already) you would most likely lose your job and God knows what else.

This is why you can't dismiss this as "a load of nonsense". It's actually incredibly dangerous and it's naive to think otherwise.