The point of eavesdropping would largely be defeated if the person can find out, so I get why it's a part of law.
The thing about NSLs is the target often never finds out because there was no public investigations or courts involved.
I remember reading a particular drug investigation had over 50 wiretaps including the mother's and sister's (of the targets) smartphones because they sometimes used their phones for business, which is pretty common in poorer households. I've always been curious if they found out afterwards.
In The Wire they had a scene where they would pause the audio if it's only someone else talking after x amount of time. But I highly doubt every single text, picture, and message sent to the person isn't being seen by at least one person.
Only if you 100% completely selfhost (machine running in the basement?). Otherwise they could compromise your hosting provider at various different levels of the stack.
Come to think of it though, even if you put your own machine in your own basement, they could just come in when you're not home and rootkit your box in numerous ways, and you'd probably never know barring some pretty heavy security.
State level actors are very hard to defend against, especially when it's your own state.
It's a matter of scale. How many experience covert ops / TAO teams do you think the FBI has? Are they going to do a covert entry to your basement, deploy a custom software or hardware implant, watch you, retrieve their implant, etc? They would have to have probably cause, and in any case they don't have the budget or people to do many.
And you can actually make it incredibly hard quite easily -- do everything on an ipad with a strong passphrase and no network connection (except occasionally to get software updates from Apple), keep it in a decent tamper evident safe (not a money safe), a painfully loud alarm with PIRs, in a location where people are around.
There is a lot of law associated with residences, often constitutional, that does not protect you when the access is to a provider.
The mere existence of a local alarm can greatly increase the risk of getting caught when going into a residence. State level actors really hate getting caught. They tend to be the sort of people who do not deal very well with uncertainty.
The thing about NSLs is the target often never finds out because there was no public investigations or courts involved.
I remember reading a particular drug investigation had over 50 wiretaps including the mother's and sister's (of the targets) smartphones because they sometimes used their phones for business, which is pretty common in poorer households. I've always been curious if they found out afterwards.
In The Wire they had a scene where they would pause the audio if it's only someone else talking after x amount of time. But I highly doubt every single text, picture, and message sent to the person isn't being seen by at least one person.