Everything is recorded. They have basically bottomless storage databases, that they store this stuff on. All communications in America are recorded by the government period.
They don't have the manpower to actually monitor every single phone call. but every single thing you've said on a phone or typed in a email, since like 1999 is stored on a massive database. They can go back and search for whatever they want, whenever they want.
Sure it's not permissible in most cases to use this stuff in court, but it can lead them right to you.
Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the worlds communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trailsparking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital pocket litter. It is, in some measure, the realization of the total information awareness program created during the first term of the Bush administrationan effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans privacy.
The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say) | Threat Level | Wired.com
Keep selling dope on that iphone though