The sheer volume of communication data is far too large to monitor everything.

By people, sure. Run it through a magical analytical algorithm that flags stuff for people to look? Or if that’s still too much everywhere, they could focus it on a certain area’s towers and process that data. Will it catch everything or not generate false positives? No, it’s not perfect, but I could see it helping them and being done.

I doubt an agency like this would just hoard the info and not proactively use.

Even a lot of offices have moved to VoIP.

Depending on where you go to school, 70% is passing while 50% is not. While “not far off,” one is a C, the other a F.

they overspend by millions

Because everyone needs their cut.

either way a military tank is better than a civilian grade sedan.

Because they’re two different vehicles, not two different classes of product. If you compare military grade phones to civilian phones, the civilian would be better, and probably cheaper due to not having the buzzwords attached. And I bet a tank made by a private firm for non-government entities would in fact be better and cheaper than a military tank.

I would like something in between…BTW I’m installing Bazzyte on another PC.

If you’re somewhat familiar with uBlue, Bazzite, and immutables, I’d go with Bluefin (Gnome) or Aurora (KDE). All three are uBlue / based off Fedora, so you don’t have to learn a 2nd OS while working on your current OS (Bazzite).

https://universal-blue.org/

These things will very likely not work on non-proprietary devices.

Depends on your bank. Most work on alternate OS (like GrapheneOS), and of course some don’t. https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compatibility-with-grapheneos/

If an app (especially bank) doesn’t work, I forward them this and try to ELI5 that their current method is flawed and less secure: https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-guide