ALL phone calls in the US are recorded and accessible to the government

A former FBI counterterrorism agent has hinted at a vast and intrusive surveillance network used by the U.S. government to monitor its own citizens.

Tim Clemente admitted as much when he appeared on CNN Wednesday night.

Discussing the Boston Marathon attack and past telephone conversations of Katherine Russell and her now deceased husband, suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Clemente said that those conversations would be available to investigators.

Clemente discussed the issue in this exchange with host Erin Burnett, as recorded by the CNN transcript.

BURNETT: ' Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It's not a voice mail. It's just a conversation. There's no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?'

CLEMENTE: 'No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It's not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.'

BURNETT: 'So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.'

CLEMENTE: 'No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.'

He reiterated those statements again on CNN on Thursday night, adding that 'all digital communications in the past' are recorded and saved.

He stressed that no digital communication was secure.

The Guardian noted that such practices have been hinted at before, such as when AT&T engineer Mark Klein revealed that the company had helped build a special network for the National Security Agency to have total access to all data about telephone calls.

And Democratic Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall have said for years that the public would be 'stunned' to learn the lengths its government went to to monitor them.

The Total Information Awareness program has been slowly instituted in the years following the 9/11 terrorist attacks with little controversy.

However the actual government practices have been kept secret.

Some new polls suggest that Americans have become increasingly concerned that they are giving up civil liberties to the war on terrorism.