What exactly would be "human bound"?
What do you mean, what exactly would be 'human bound'? Think about it: You've got the NSA supercomputers setup with logic+filters reading supposedly
every email. Plus txt now of course if we're going to assume they're doing that also. Plus actual voice calls. In the entire US, plus, in all the other places in the world we're monitoring.
Stop and think for a minute how much pure information that is to process. Now realize that the logic+filters are going to cull some x amount of information out of the raw feed, to possibly be further processed by another set of supercomputers. Finally, at some point, y amount of information hits a real low level person (with the requesite security clearances of course, and NDA) for the first step in human processing. How much info do you think that person is getting put in their queue, given the truly massive (I'd almost say unimaginable) amount of raw data the NSA and other agencies process? The answer would be: More than the person could handle.
Now, I know we make fun of government around here, and a lot of it as warranted. I'd hope though that at the NSA and other agencies, where doing their job really is something the Fed should be doing and
is actually important, they'd be taking things a little more more seriously than say those who hand out the Links card crack. So I've got to think, the intent of the system as setup isn't to get these folks my NewEgg receipt, or my e-mail where I'm asking my uncle how many oil filters he wants for the lake tractor, but rather, get these limited human assets as good as possible intercepts.
Even with such a system in place, given the amount of raw intelligence processed, each person is going to have a perpetual backlog of work to get through*. It is for this reason alone I'm not too worried about NSA doing this. The odds are just so massively low for any normal person in the US even getting contacted/truly monitored that it's a non-issue.
*: I'm talking about those that work at the NSA/CIA, not some bored security person at some US base whose in charge of monitoring base communications.
And they can't develop better algorithms (or whatever the hell you call the "scanning" software) to take out 95% or more of that human work?
They can. 95% of 1,000,000,000,000 though is still a really large number. Now you need the people to handle that. Then another set of people to handle their output. How big of a workforce do you want to have, how much security overhead do you want to have watching those people?
Chuck