Documents on N.S.A. Efforts to Diagram Social Networks of U.S. Citizens

New documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, provide a rare window into the N.S.A.’s push to exploit phone and e-mail data of Americans after it lifted restrictions in 2010.

Suggested impacts of the approach:

" In the first place it allows NSA to discover and track connections between foreign intelligence targets and possible 2nd Party or US communicants. In the second place it enables large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness of every node or address in the graph."

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/09/29/us/documents-on-nsa-efforts-to-diagram-social-networks-of-us-citizens.html