I'm in ur contact list harvesting ur d00ds

From the Wapo (Barton Gellman & Ashkan Soltani, "NSA collects millions of e-mail address books globally," Washington Post, 14 October 2013):

The National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials and top-secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The collection program, which has not been disclosed before, intercepts e-mail address books and “buddy lists” from instant messaging services as they move across global data links. Online services often transmit those contacts when a user logs on, composes a message, or synchronizes a computer or mobile device with information stored on remote servers.

Read the full article.

Documents cited in the article can be found here, here, and here.