Yesterday, the Washington Post’s top story was another leak from NSA contractor Edward Snowden.  Unlike many of the Post’s other Snowden stories, where sensationalism has greatly outweighed the reported facts about this or that NSA program, this one had more substance and less breathless analysis.

The core of the story is the Post’s own analysis of some 160,000 email and instant messaging exchanges that NSA had intercepted and which Snowden had somehow gotten access to and passed along to the Post’s Barton Gellman.  The headline in the story is that the vast majority of the Internet cache collected by NSA was not of suspected terrorists but non-targeted individuals, American and non-American alike.  With graphics included, the Post concludes that NSA has been collecting vast amounts of data involving the communications of ordinary, presumably, innocent citizens, while finding within this collection sweep only a small percentage of useable intelligence.