Most of the things he mentions are very cheap to pull off, though. Proxy honeypots, sniffing ISP internet connections, querying IPs, email surveillance -- the infrastructure is already in place they just have to type some commands. Cost: $0.
I'm sorry but I have to jump in here - you're writing off an awful lost of resources under the banner of "they just have to type some commands."
I'm sorry you had to take that literal, I was just figuratively speaking.
My point is that it is the human part of surveillance that is costly. For everything that can be collected automatically with systems already in place (even though placing those systems could have been very expensive), the threshold to use it is very low. When the information is collected and processed, what rests is only database queries. "automatic surveillance" is (comparatively) cheap.
In contrast, "expensive surveillance" is placing monitoring equipment in a house, parking some fan sneakily around the block to listen in, and such. It's labour and resource intensive.
I'm sorry but I have to jump in here - you're writing off an awful lost of resources under the banner of "they just have to type some commands."