See https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/wordgames#collect https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/wordgames#collect : Normally, one would think that a communication that

See https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/wordgames#collect https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/wordgames#collect : Normally, one would think that a communication that has been intercepted and stored in a government database as “collected.” But the government’s definition of what it means to “collect” intelligence information is quite different from its plain meaning. Under Department of Defense regulations, information is considered to be “collected” only after it has been “received for use by an employee of a DoD intelligence component,” and “data acquired by electronic means is ‘collected’ only when it has been processed into intelligible form.” In other words, the NSA can intercept and store communications in its data base and have an algorithm search them for key words and analyze the meta data without ever considering the communications “collected.” TL;DR they're being swept up and stored indefinitely for everyone, all the time, right now.