Rest assured, friends, this is completely untrue.
The so called "project" echelon is a misguided referrence to a top of the line e-mail scanning program called Echelon developed by the UK and the US for e-mail security, and I think some kind of tax-evasion detection (don't ask me how they do that...)
But they are
not tapping your phone calls, and you can not be arrested only on the basis of words in a telephone conversation. Vermain, don't fall for the hysteria.