Details on millions of American phone calls. Records of e-mails, texts, video chats and more from overseas. And pulsing beneath it all, a worrying concern there's more to the government's surveillance programs than what's been acknowledged. All the revelations about U.S. surveillance programs in recent days have put the government on the defensive, set privacy advocates howling for reform and left millions of Americans somewhere in the middle, wondering what the news means to them and what, if anything, they should do about it.
The man at the top says they should just relax. "Nobody is listening to your telephone calls," President Barack Obama said Friday as he tried to reassure Americans who have had to digest a dizzying array of revelations in the past few days. Among them:
-- U.S. intelligence agencies are, in fact, collecting details on just about every telephone call placed each day in the United States, U.S. officials confirmed. And they've been doing it for seven years, a senator added.
-- They're also monitoring the online activities of at least some overseas customers of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple and other providers of popular online services.
NSA Web snooping no big deal to some
-- And they may be scooping up credit card data, as well, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday, citing people familiar with the operations of the National Security Agency.
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