That reminds me of my first reaction to CypherPunks: why would the government spend thousands of $$$ of supercomputer time & mathematician brains to see your miserable piece of information, when all they have to do is lock you up at the back of a countryside garage, beat the shit out of you, inject various chemicals into your blood until you spit out your secret key ?
Because of economics and political stability. You can build computers and monitoring devices in secret, deploy them in secret, and listen to _everything_. To listen to everything with bludgeons and pharmaceuticals would not only cost more in labor and equipment, but also engender a radicalizing backlash to an actual police state. Of course, if one is paranoid, these considerations of the whole do not hold, since for only one person the cost balance is reversed. There is safety in numbers. Eric