The government probably isn't listening to your cellphone.

So I recently (in my informatics class) ran across the amount of data that was sent via cell-phones last year (2008). Roughly 15 exabytes.

What is an exabyte? 1000 (or 1024, depending on interpretation) petabytes.

What is a petabyte? 1000 (or 1024, depending on interpretation) terabytes.

What is a terabyte? 1000 (or 1024, depending on interpretation) gigabytes... which is still a billion bytes, each of which is eight bits.

For scale: If they finally convert the library of congress scans into text, the entire Library of Congress (today) would fit on roughly 10 terabytes. Which puts the amount of information conveyed over cell-phones to be one hundred thousand Libraries of Congress.

So can the government go through all that? Sure. Can they go through it in any meaningful way?

Hell no.