It’s no secret the the U.S. government enjoys taking certain liberties with citizens’ privacy by wiretapping cellphones, but did you know that each time Uncle Sam decides to peek in someone’s phone records they get a big bill from the carrier?

AT&T charges the government a $325 “activation free” for each wiretap and then they rack up an extra $10 a day to keep the line open. Want the NSA to think twice before tapping you? Then maybe you should go with Verizon as their wiretaps cost the most at $775 per month and then $500 for each month after that.

While the U.S. market has been the biggest measure for success with handset makers over the last few years, all of that may soon change as the U.S. smartphone market quickly gets dwarfed by China and others.

According to a new report from ABI Research, China will displace the U.S. as the largest smartphone market by the end of 2013, but just five years later both India and Brazil will pass the U.S. too:

Verizon Wireless has been hard at work rolling out LTE on its network over the past three years or so, but the company announced today that the nationwide 4G LTE rollout is ‘substantially complete.’

With support for over 500 LTE markets, Verizon’s 4G LTE network now covers 95% of the U.S. population. Verizon Wireless CTO Nicola Palmer says the company isn’t totally done just yet. As reported by PC Mag, Palmer says the company plans to add more services to LTE over the next few years and open new markets:

Last month Google announced that Google Play would sell the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4 running stock versions. While the two smartphone aren’t ready to ship quite yet, Google just made them available on Google Play today.

The Google edition HTC One will cost $599.99 while the Samsung Galaxy S4 will run at $649.99. Both phones will come with the stock version of Android installed and will start shipping on July 9th.

The total number of mobile phones shipped in Western Europe fell to its lowest level in nine years during Q1 2013 as total units dropped 4.2 percent year-on-year to 43.6 million.

The slowdown in sales comes sooner than analysts were expecting even though Apple only sold 800,000 units fewer than Q1 2012 and Samsung sold 3.4 million units more.