Enter a new report published by Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School. "What the Government Does With Americans' Data" is the best single attempt I've seen to explain all of the ways that surveillance professionals are collecting, storing, and disseminating private data on U.S. citizens. The report's text and helpful flow-chart illustrations run to roughly 50 pages. Unless you're already one of America's foremost experts on these subjects, it is virtually impossible to read this synthesis without coming away better informed.

The text gives detailed answers to questions like, "What does the NSA do with all the emails and phone calls of American citizens that it collects?" Then the information is summed up in graphics like this one:

The rules in place are often just as worrisome as the cases of national-security officials breaking them. "Policymakers remain under significant pressure to prevent the next 9/11, and the primary lesson many have taken from that tragedy is that too much information was kept siloed," the report notes. "Often lost in that lesson is that the dots the government failed to connect before 9/11 were generally not items of innocuous information, but connections to known al Qaeda or other foreign terrorist suspects." Nevertheless, the federal government is now awash in innocuous private details about the lives millions of innocents.

Often they can be legally retained for years or even decades—and shared with different federal bureaucracies in ways that make them virtually impossible to ever erase.

And it isn't just the NSA. The FBI, the National Counterterrorism Information Center, and other agencies besides come in for criticism due to their alarming behavior. As Peter Moskowitz aptly put it, the report "synthesizes much of what Americans have been learning about piecemeal for the last few months," and anyone looking to understand the facts more clearly ought to go give it a look. If there is ever a time when a majority of Americans understand its contents, this country will no longer accept the surveillance policies shaped by the Patriot Act, extralegal information hoovering, and what is effectively a massive coverup. As facts are better explained, the whole effort will only seem more imprudent.