N.S.A. Gathers Data on Social Connections of U.S. Citizens

WASHINGTON — Since 2010, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans' social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with officials....

...The agency can augment the communications data with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data, according to the documents. They do not indicate any restrictions on the use of such "enrichment" data, and several former senior Obama administration officials said the agency drew on it for both Americans and foreigners....

...A top-secret document titled "Better Person Centric Analysis" describes how the agency looks for 94 "entity types," including phone numbers, e-mail addresses and IP addresses. In addition, the N.S.A. correlates 164 "relationship types" to build social networks and what the agency calls "community of interest" profiles, using queries like "travelsWith, hasFather, sentForumMessage, employs."

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/us/nsa-examines-social-networks-of-us-citizens.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Oh yeah, they're just collecting "metadata" on "foreigners" and "terrorists."