It used to be a conspiracy theory that the NSA and maybe other 3 letter agencies had closets at ISPs where they were slurping up all the traffic, later it turned out to be true around 2006 and they definitely weren’t open about it until whistleblowers started making noise.
USA mass surveillance isn’t a conspiracy theory because they’ve been pretty open about it.
NSA warrantless surveillance was a huge topic in the 2000s and even involved a lot of litigation.
It used to be a conspiracy theory that the NSA and maybe other 3 letter agencies had closets at ISPs where they were slurping up all the traffic, later it turned out to be true around 2006 and they definitely weren’t open about it until whistleblowers started making noise.