At the core of the Bush administration's illegal eavesdropping on the American public's telephone calls is a black box called the Narus STA 6400.  The manufacturer, Narus, is a company that provides software programs for internet billing and tracking which has now branched out into the area of survellance.  The company's own webpage tells you what you need to know:

As the foundation for the industry’s most advanced IP security, intercept and traffic classification applications, NarusInsight is unique in its ability to simultaneously provide deep packet inspection from layer 3 to layer 7 and complete correlation across every link and element on the network. NarusInsight provides carriers with the flexibility and superior price performance benefits associated with deployment either at the network edge, the high-speed core or both simultaneously.

The core of the survellance operations is the Narus Insight Intercept Suite:

[The] capabilities include playback of streaming media (i.e. VoIP), rendering of web pages, examination of e-mail and the ability to analyze the payload/attachments of e-mail or file transfer protocols. Narus partner products offer the ability to quickly analyze information collected by the Directed Analysis or Lawful Intercept modules. When Narus partners’ powerful analytic tools are combined with the surgical targeting and real-time collection capabilities of Directed Analysis and Lawful Intercept modules, analysts or law enforcement agents are provided capabilities that have been unavailable thus far.

That's right, using these tools, the government can look at your email and its attachments, listen in to your internet telephone calls and see everything you are searching.

But Narus isn't only helping the U.S. control communications, its also helping Communist China do the same by allowing the Communist party to close off access to internet telephone calls in Shanghai.

How does our government use the device?  Read the affidavit of an AT&T technician who worked with the NSA to install the equipment:

In 2002, when I was working in an AT&T office in San Francisco, the site manager told me to expect a visit from a National Security Agency agent, who was to interview a management-level technician for a special job. The agent came, and by chance I met him and directed him to the appropriate people.

In January 2003, I, along with others, toured the AT&T central office on Folsom Street in San Francisco -- actually three floors of an SBC building. There I saw a new room being built adjacent to the 4ESS switch room where the public's phone calls are routed. I learned that the person whom the NSA interviewed for the secret job was the person working to install equipment in this room.

While doing my job, I learned that fiber optic cables from the secret room were tapping into the Worldnet circuits by splitting off a portion of the light signal. . .   I also saw design documents dated Jan. 13, 2004 and Jan. 24, 2003, which instructed technicians on connecting some of the already in-service circuits to the "splitter" cabinet, which diverts some of the light signal to the secret room. The circuits listed were the Peering Links, which connect Worldnet with other networks and hence the whole country, as well as the rest of the world.

One of the documents listed the equipment installed in the secret room, and this list included a Narus STA 6400, which is a "Semantic Traffic Analyzer". The Narus STA technology is known to be used particularly by government intelligence agencies because of its ability to sift through large amounts of data looking for preprogrammed targets.

My job required me to connect new circuits to the "splitter" cabinet and get them up and running. While working on a particularly difficult one with a technician back East, I learned that other such "splitter" cabinets were being installed in other cities, including Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego. . . Based on my understanding of the connections and equipment at issue, it appears the NSA is capable of conducting what amounts to vacuum-cleaner surveillance of all the data crossing the Internet -- whether that be peoples' e-mail, Web surfing or any other data.

This is how your government spies on you and everyone else on the planet.