Fiber Optic Cable=Total Information Awareness?

I recently worked for Qwest, a 14-state phone company. During this time I was told that copper wire is currently being phased out, and fiber optic cable is going to gradually replace our copper wiring. Fiber optic cable is super fast and can send up to 14 million gigabytes per second. Now look at these three articles.
Oregon Fiber Optic Network
NSA fiber optic wiretaps
NSA - AT&T

It appears as if the NSA is already colluding with phone companies with this fiber optic cable.

Now remember Total Information Awareness?
Once a national fiber optic grid is in place, unthinkable amounts of information will be instantly transferred across the nation. This fiber optic network is basically the key to implementing a massive surveillance network that can be monitored from a single location. More specifically, a super-computer that monitors and tracks every aspect of every person's life.



[edit on 31-10-2007 by Trauma]

verizon already provides 20mbit up and down with FIOS (in-home fiber). i would be ignorant to say that this isn't connected to the government since we're all aware of systems already in place. i'd like to think that they would gather more information that could be processed, but i suppose if you sufficiently throttle the bandwidth on a user's connection, you could limit the amount of data that needs to be crunched by some computer or farm of computers. otherwise you would just need to use this in a wire-tap sort of scenario where you snoop only certain subnets or users.

if i were ever really worried about my privacy online i would start using an anonymous proxy that supported some kind of encryption. or start my own internet...with blackjack...and hookers. ah forget the blackjack.