History of Telephone Tapping

The Wikipedia page on the history of Telephone tapping is pretty interesting. There's a constant back and forth between new technology and about 10 years later government wanting easy access. There's also a long history of government exceeding legal means to tap private communications. Also this:

In the Greek telephone tapping case 2004–2005 more than 100 mobile phone numbers belonging mostly to members of the Greek government, including the Prime Minister of Greece, and top-ranking civil servants were found to have been illegally tapped for a period of at least one year. The Greek government concluded this had been done by a foreign intelligence agency, for security reasons related to the 2004 Olympic Games, by unlawfully activating the lawful interception subsystem of the Vodafone Greece mobile network. An Italian tapping case which surfaced in November 2007 revealed significant manipulation of the news at the national television company RAI.