NSA surveillance 101: What US intelligence agencies are doing, what they know

US intelligence agencies are gathering massive amounts of US telephone calling data and social media data on both foreigners and citizens. Here are seven questions and answers about what is known so far.

So, what do the feds have on me?

Rick Bowmer/AP
The NSA's Utah Data Center in Bluffdale, Utah., is filled with super-powered computers designed to store massive amounts of information gathered secretly from phone calls and e-mails.

Nobody knows except the government. It seems plausible that phone call records – the metadata of Americans’ calls – may be sitting in an NSA database. It’s possible that social media data posted on the Web are in a NSA database, too. But until Google and others can reveal what kinds of data were given to the government, we won’t know.

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