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Adding to your question, it seems there are two things that are needed: Reducing reliance on a third-party service (phone company, Skype, etc.) that may keep call records which can be subpoenaed; and encrypting the conversation itself so it can't be monitored.

It seeems there are "crypto phones", but do these still rely on a third-party service to initiate and transmit the call? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_phone

From what I can gather, those crypto phones will encrypt the communication but the identity of the two parties and the duration of the calls would still be known.

SIP and Jingle calls can be afaik encrypted. Can those replace POTS? I don't know.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZRTP

VOIP is just as easily snooped as regular lines. It's not as easy, but you can do it with the right tools.

Which is the "+Tor" part, which both encrypts the data and obscures the sending and receiving parties.

> VOIP is just as easily snooped as regular lines. It's not as easy, but you can do it with the right tools.

Wait, is it just as easy or not as easy?

The point is that there's no difference when the resources of the government are put to the task.