Shakes here...
It's like a big cable-knit sweater that someone keeps knitting…and knitting…and knitting. The basics of the newest revelation: The NSA traced and analyzed internet and telephone communications both coming in and going out of the US by “tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system’s main arteries,” making the volume of information surveilled without warrants much larger than the White House has acknowledged.
American telecom companies have the NSA backdoor access to “streams of domestic and international communications,” so that they might, in addition to eavesdropping, find patterns in communications that might highlight suspicious activity: “who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, and the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages.”