The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials.
By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from among hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot.
What did the man in charge say? Let's rewind...
"We don't have a domestic spying program," Obama said, describing the NSA efforts as "mechanisms that can track a phone number or an e-mail address that is connected to a terrorist attack ... That information is useful."