Last December in an interview with Russia Today (video above), former NSA crypto-mathematician William Binney disclosed the extent to which he believed the US government was not only capable of, but actively engages in spying on internet data and web activity across the country. Binney said that the FBI has access to the emails of everyone in the US, holds a target list and monitors every email to and from those contained on the list.

If the interview was alarming in its suggestion then, it’s downright scary considering this evening’s report from the Washington Post and the Guardian that the US government has allegedly been mining data from eight of the world’s largest internet companies, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and others. (The report mentions nine companies; one of them, YouTube, is part of Google.)

Here’s some of what Binney guessed at back in December:

The FBI has access to the data collected, which is basically the emails of everybody in the country. …This can happen to anyone. If become a target for whatever reason, if they’re targeted by the government, the government can go in–or the FBI or other agencies of the government can go into that database and pull all that data they’ve collected over the years and reanalyze it all, retroactively analyze everything they’ve done. Over the last 10 years at least. …It’s everybody.

If Binney erred at all, it was merely in underestimating the reach of the government’s surveillance, which, if the report is to be believed, is capable of not only tracking emails, but a person’s movements and contacts over time.

Here’s some of what the Washington Post reported this evening: