Phone tapping: what's the big deal?

I wonder how long is the public going to fool itself with regards to freedoms, privacy and such. Government can not function effectively without such an instrument. While phone records might have started to be analysed on such a massive scale only recently, international phone calls were probably monitored ALWAYS. To support this claim I can offer the following, if anecdotal, evidence. In year 2000 I was using landline to call my parents abroad. It was not uncommon with our crappy provider to have extensive peak periods when we would not be able to connect for up to an hour, or at all. The trick that worked extremely well was (I don't remember if I came up with the idea myself or whether I picked the idea up somewhere...) to loudly say "Allah akbar" into the microphone while long beeps would sound. I'm not kidding you: our calls got higer priority and would go through as if by magic. I also remember that this trick worked for a couple of months only. Obvoiusly, since the rest of the conversation was completely uninteresting, and spoken in a language that has nothing Arabic to it... Fun, fun, fun! Just as people are expoiting Google's PageRank to their advantage, every similarly overarching system can be too.