I think the biggest actual capture is buffering. I suspect the NSA is buffering almost all communication in the USA (or maybe just international cable communications, but I&#x27;d bet all). But it&#x27;s not actively used or analyzed unless something comes up. And after a few days it&#x27;s deleted. If you end up shooting up a Eagles of Death Metal show in Paris, they can rewind your recent communications.<p>Whether that is mass surveillance is pretty questionable IMO. It&#x27;s a sort of a &quot;if a tree falls in the wood and nobody hears, does it make a sound&quot; territory. It&#x27;s really no different than the Post Office having your mail. They could rip it open, but their mere possession isn&#x27;t surveillance.<p>I think where you have a better argument is the meta data mass collection. They physically got that information. It&#x27;s on their servers forever. And here is where the surveillance part comes in--they actually run analysis on it. They claim they only stay within &quot;two hops&quot; of known suspects, but that&#x27;s probably BS and you get into a &quot;6 degree of Keven Bacon&quot; situation where two hops probably gets nearly everyone.<p>So I think that meta data program is the only program I&#x27;ve heard about from the Snowden leaks that is actually a mass surveillance of the American people.<p>But there is a counter argument. It&#x27;s mass surveillance of information that isn&#x27;t actually private, thus, it&#x27;s not a intrusion of your privacy. They are only looking at data that your telephone company has on you. In fact, baring any sort of data privacy law, that information is Verizon&#x27;s and they can do what they want with it. Including hand it over to the government.<p>And in practice, American companies keep that sort of meta data and use it for commercial purposes all the time. Hell, google doesn&#x27;t even have to triangulate towers, they just use the GPS the customer paid for to track them to within 10 feet.