Yeah it's crazy but then again no average person knows the kind of technology that governments, militaries, and elite/royal families could possess.. it's pretty much unfathomable. We live in a time where such a technology that can process that kind of data most definitely exists. There are super computers that have memory capacity something along millions/billions of gigabytes worth of memory.
I've worked with some of the classified stuff out there. For the most part - it's not what it is made of that makes it classified technology. "We reverse-engineered this alien disintegrator ray!" - so what the heck is China going to do about it? Hunt down their own crashed UFO?
What makes something classified is, usually, its manner of operation and the fact that revealing how it operates would allow someone else to readily copy it and/or defeat its method of operation.
The exception to this rule is in the special warfare departments. They get stupid amounts of money to create Frankenstein tools/weapons/gear to fit specific missions and sate the curiosity of their developmental teams. They'll read about a new research break-through at some university of a trial-run part, system, or product and pay $50,000 per unit for a prototype laser LED that is simply not possible to market (because the technology/process to produce it for any kind of reasonable price in a relevant volume doesn't exist) until anywhere from 5 to 25 years in the future (a number of old technology breakthroughs have been shelved until manufacturing or other technologies make them practical to produce - we're seeing that with things like carbon fiber and composites - the process for mass production of them largely came from defense contracts for high-performance airframes... 25 years ago; ceramics have been around for a while, too - but now the are getting better ways of forming them into useful parts and they are also impregnating them with metals to create meta-materials).
Anyway - the point there is that, most of the time, what they are using is well within the knowledge of public domain. It is just the fact that they are using it and exactly how they are using it or what for that is classified and restricted. It's not like they are working with things we can't speculate on. Even some of the most advanced optical systems and techno spy-gear being produced today is built off of principles described in research papers published in the 80s.
When it comes to the area of the internet, networks, and computer systems - the government and military are lagging behind the corporate world, considerably. That is why the government has to work with companies like Google and Microsoft to do much of anything in the world of the internet.
Which is largely why it's in a legal gray area, too. Technically - a lot of the companies are in their rights to turn over information to the government. Their servers - they can allow the police in just as any rental home owner can let the police into one of his rental spaces.
But even then - a lot of cities/states have laws about what police can and cannot legally do regarding renters that act to protect them against what many feel is a rights violation.
Like the general consensus, i don't care at all because i have nothing to hide. People are too bent on the their rights, when they don't even need or use most of them anyway.
The problem isn't what you're doing wrong.
It's that they can decide that what you're doing is wrong at any given time, and have a record to support their case.
The definition of a "terrorist" has expanded greatly under the Obama administration. People are always yammering about the Patriot Act - which is what it is... but the fact is that it wasn't until this administration that the concept of domestic terrorism was so radically expanded and the available actions that the government can take against people also radically expanded.
This should exemplify how hopelessly broken our system is. All of that was done with minimal involvement of Congress. The President's administration changed what defined a terrorist and changed the laws regarding what the administration can do about people defined as terrorists.
That's the establishment of an institutional oligarchy that can persecute whomever it wishes.
Obviously someone looks at them, if they didn't, we wouldn't be getting those statements. The general public, however, does not. Just as the general public does not view our internet history.
Actually, most of those statements don't get looked at. They are auto-generated by a computer - and a lot of companies have been trying to move away from paper statements that enumerate transactions (most have for debit cards).
Think about it. How many people use their check/debit card for fast food?
For groceries? For gas? For day-to-day transactions?
That's -billions- of transactions per year. No human institution can possibly look through that much. It's all done by computer. The system is simply a record that can be searched through by a computer. "I want to know who has shopped at Lowe's more than 3 times a week within the past 72 weeks."
No one is actually looking at your account, unless you are under suspicion of something.
Which is why "Big Data" is a flawed intelligence philosophy. Without a strong Human Intelligence network to feed valid queries into the databases - very little useful information can be gained from maintaining those databases. At least for national security purposes.
There is no backdoor..... Backdoors would be a hackers wet dream.
There's some kind of 'agreement' between the two. A back-door into the personal and enterprise computer would be a notoriously bad idea, as you say.
There are other complications to things. For instance - a lot of businesses host their websites on third party providers that reside locally. They are set up in such a way that it's difficult for centralized monitoring to occur using server logs and other such things. As with anything - if you really want to find information, there is a way to defeat those systems and find out what you want to know... but it's a matter of whether or not you really want to invest the resources to bother with it.
I would be curious if Microsoft, themselves, maintain the ability to back-door into your system even if Remote features are disabled. My knowledge of networks is substantially lagging behind my knowledge of digital electronics and hardware. I could envision a few ways to make it happen... but the time-honored weakness of any security system is the people who built it, operate it, and use it. An angry employee (or just one who is willing to agree to the price he's been offered) would trash that concept in a heartbeat.
