The Ultimate Net Monitor

Here's an article from Wired about a company called Narus and its net monitoring system. Apprentently the NSA had installed the box, which can monitor just about anything that passes through the server of which it's connected to, in AT&T's San Francisco switching office.
An important tidbit in this article is how China and other countries use the Narus box to stop VoIP phone calls coming and going out their respective countries and that this box can be used to charge cooperating phone companies for VoIP calls used over eachother's networks. I've been wondering how VoIP makes money...

"Our product is designed to comply (with) all of the laws in all of the countries we ship to," says Bannerman. "Many of our customers have built their own applications. We have no idea what they do."

http://wired.com/news/technology/0,70914-0.html?tw=wn_index_3