NSA Collects E-Mail Address Books

Does anything surprise us anymore? New documents from Edward Snowden shows a never-before-disclosed program in which the National Security Agency is gathering hundreds of millions of address books from e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world. The amount of data being harvested is a "sizable fraction" of the accounts in the world, including many Americans, and is being analyzed to hidden connections and map relationships between foreign intelligence targets. Documents show a typical day brings in nearly 700,000 connections from sites like Facebook, Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail, along with 500,000 buddy lists from chat services.