Given the amount of internet fuckery that happened in the 2016 election, I’m not surprised that the Pentagon is monitoring everything going on in the Internet. I’m not sure what they can do about it in most cases, but I guess it helps to keep tabs.
We've known that the NSA stores everything they can get their hands on for more than a decade. It's one of those things we just pretend isn't still happening.
During the Civil War, Lincoln had every telegraph line in the country routed though the White House. Wild Wild West the movie didn't do the ops history justice, but was close, and it was fiction.