According to a new report by The New York Times, the National Security Agency (NSA) is collecting content—not just the previously acknowledged metadata—of Americans who simply “mention information about foreigners under surveillance, according to intelligence officials.”

The Times says that mention of this practice first appeared in Snowden documents published by The Guardian on June 20, but was “largely overlooked.”

The Times wrote:

To conduct the surveillance, the NSA is temporarily copying and then sifting through the contents of what is apparently most e-mails and other text-based communications that cross the border. The senior intelligence official, who, like other former and current government officials, spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic, said the NSA makes a “clone of selected communication links” to gather the communications, but declined to specify details, like the volume of the data that passes through them.

This is along the lines of what Ars has reported before: the NSA is capturing vast swaths of unencrypted HTTP traffic at sites that span the entire world. However, due to storage limitations, it seems that it can only keep that data for relatively short periods of time. As we described earlier, it would be nearly impossible for the NSA to store things for an extended period of time—one leaked slide says that for a single 30-day period in 2012, the data included “at least 41 billion total records.”

The new revelations appear to confirm that the NSA has broad surveillance parameters for “targets” that seem to include Americans, too. It also appears that intelligence officials are dancing around what the word “target” means.

In June 2013, at a House Intelligence Committee hearing, John Inglis, the deputy director of the NSA, said, “We do not target the content of US person communications without a specific warrant anywhere on the Earth.”

“There is an ambiguity in the law about what it means to ‘target’ someone,” Timothy Edgar, now a visiting fellow at Brown University, told the Times. Edgar formerly served as director of privacy and civil liberties for the White House National Security Staff and was a former national security attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

“You can never intentionally target someone inside the United States," he added. "Those are the words we were looking at. We were most concerned about making sure the procedures only target communications that have one party outside the United States.”

As the Times reported:

The rule they ended up writing, which was secretly approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, says that the NSA must ensure that one of the participants in any conversation that is acquired when it is searching for conversations about a targeted foreigner must be outside the United States, so that the surveillance is technically directed at the foreign end.

Civil libertarians and privacy scholars have already begun their vocal protests.

“This is precisely the kind of generalized spying that the Fourth Amendment was intended to prohibit,” said Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director, in a statement.

“The government's scrutiny of virtually every international e-mail sent by Americans will have extraordinary consequences for free expression. Americans will inevitably hesitate to discuss controversial topics, visit politically sensitive websites, or interact with foreigners with dissenting views. By injecting the NSA into virtually every cross-border interaction, the US government will forever alter what has always been an open exchange of ideas.”