Thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden, The Washington Post reports that the National Security Agency's mass surveillance operations include the content of telephone calls as well as the metadata.



The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden.

Since documents from Snowden revealed that the NSA is sweeping up en masse hundreds of millions of phone records, surveillance supporters have argued that because the information "is just metadata" it is not mass surveillance. (For anyone who hasn't been following, metadata generally means phone record of who called who and for how long, but not the voice data). The argument fails first because metadata is highly revealing, as countless technology and intelligence experts have articulated over the past nine months.

WAPO's report confirms that it's also factually incorrect to claim "it's just metadata:"



Ubiquitous voice surveillance, even overseas, pulls in a great deal of content from Americans who telephone, visit and work in the target country. It may also be seen as inconsistent with Obama’s Jan. 17 pledge “that the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security,” regardless of nationality, “and that we take their privacy concerns into account.”

Yet again, despite assurance from the President himself that NSA is not spying on innocent Americans, when given facts instead of government talking points, the public learns NSA is sweeping up innocent Americans' phone conversations on under the guise of protecting national security.