Late Saturday night, The Washington Post dropped a bombshell of a report related to a trove of documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The documents included 160,000 e-mail and instant-message conversations intercepted by the NSA, as well as 7,900 documents taken from more than 11,000 online accounts. The Washington Post says that the information spans from 2009 to 2012.

This article is the first acknowledgement that the cache of documents from Snowden includes not just documents describing how NSA operates, but actual intercepted communications. Those communications include both intelligence targets, as well as "people who may cross a target's path," the Post explained.

In the Post's analysis, “nearly half” of the files contained details that the NSA had marked as belonging to US citizens or residents, which the agency masked, or “minimized,” to protect those citizens' privacy. Still, despite the 65,000 minimized references to Americans that the Post found in the cache, 900 additional e-mail addresses were found unmasked “that could be strongly linked to US citizens or US residents.”

The Post did not reproduce any of the intercepted communications.

The paper does describe some of the valuable information that the NSA was able to gather in the sweeping surveillance method. “[F]resh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into US computer networks,” are all contained within the communications that Snowden leaked. But many more, belonging to more than 10,000 account holders, are unrelated to national security and are decidedly personal, detailing “love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes.”

The e-mails and instant-messages were collected through the NSA's PRISM and Upstream programs, the Post said.

The Post also notes that while collection of third-party communications is unavoidable in many cases, agencies like the FBI are required “to stop listening to a call if a suspect’s wife or child is using the phone.” By contrast, the NSA “collected the words and identities” of every person in a chat room that a target entered, including the identities of lurkers who made no comment in the chat room. The NSA's general counsel “has testified that the NSA does not generally attempt to remove irrelevant personal content, because it is difficult for one analyst to know what might become relevant to another,” the Post reports.

In order to mask the identities of the people that appear incidentally in the intercepted communications, the NSA "minimizes" names and terms found in the communications that could identify “possible,” “potential,” and “probable” US persons and entities like companies, universities, or Web-mail hosts. “Some of them border on the absurd,” the Post writes, “using titles that could apply to only one man. A 'minimized US president-elect' begins to appear in the files in early 2009, and references to the current 'minimized US president' appear 1,227 times in the following four years.”

Finally and perhaps most disturbingly, the Post writes that NSA analysts are taught that PRISM and Upstream collection of communications only requires a “reasonable belief” that the communicator is foreign to satisfy spying regulations. “One analyst rests her claim that a target is foreign on the fact that his e-mails are written in a foreign language, a quality shared by tens of millions of Americans,” the Post notes. “Others are allowed to presume that anyone on the chat 'buddy list' of a known foreign national is also foreign.”