Reply #84: Not exactly

[Canuckistanian]

Your voice turns into a stream of ones and zeroes at your local Central Office (the telephone company or telco). From there, it gets combined ("multiplexed")with many others and then sent to a regional center.

The "tapping" is most likely done at one of those regional centers. Your digital stream can be separated ("de-multiplexed") from the rest as a copy and either recorded on disk or monitored in real-time or instantly analyzed by voice recognition computers.

These data streams are moved around the country in any number of ways by the telco. As you may or may not know, occasionally, your voice may not follow a straight line path from you to your other party. Your signal may be bounced around the country several times in times of congestion.

This is not exactly the internet, but sometimes it may be combined with internet or video or other audio streams. It's all digital data and it's all handled the same way. High speed switches don't care what the source of the data is, it's all just ones and zeroes. And any stream can be copied and redirected. It's done all the time.

Does this make sense?