NBC: Gov't NOT "Mining" Data, It's "Collecting" Data on "Every Single American"

I honestly don't know what this means, but it makes me extremely nervous.

From NBC:

In another revelation about the extent of U.S. government surveillance of Americans' communications, the Washington Post reports tonight that the National Security Agency and the FBI are "tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person's movements and contacts over time."

According to the Post, the secret program, known as PRISM, has not been disclosed publicly before.

The companies are "participating knowingly" in the operations, the Post reports.

They are: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple...

NBC News has confirmed from two sources that the PRISM program exists, but a government official says it is a data collection program rather than a data mining program.The reports closely follow the revelation that the U.S. is secretly collecting records of millions of Verizon telephone calls.