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.

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.