It “does not apply to U.S. citizens.”

That's what the president said in June about NSA’s email collecting program.  I guess he misspoke as we now learn that NSA gathers contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world.  And they do gather a few contact lists, like 250,000,000 a year.  The NSA thinks this is kosher, as they do not use US-based computers to gather the lists; it's done overseas.

The contact lists are probably richer sources of information than the meta-data of the e-mails themselves since the lists include not only names and e-mail addresses, but also telephone numbers, street addresses, and business and family information. Inbox listings of e-mail accounts stored in the “cloud” sometimes contain content, such as the first few lines of a message.