"Current technology simply does not permit us to positively identify all of the persons or locations associated with a given communication (for example, it may

"Current technology simply does not permit us to positively identify all of the persons or locations associated with a given communication (for example, it may be possible to say with certainty that a communication traversed a particular path within the internet. It is harder to know the ultimate source or destination, or more particularly the identity of the person represented by the TO:, FROM: or CC: field of an e-mail address or the abstraction of an IP address)." That's an interesting statement, especially how specific they got with regards to email. There are tons of email accounts that are used but are not tied to Facebook or Paypal or some other identifying service that the NSA has access. To me this all stinks of the worst-case surveillance state scenario but logically, it's starting to look a lot less sinister than I initially thought it was. Looking through 3 billion records and tying them to people would require a massive database of Facebook, Google, etc. users, ISP subscribers, and tons of other data. I sure as hell hope that the NSA can't come up with a number of Americans spied on without invading people's privacy and serving more warrants/tapping more sources for information because otherwise it would mean they would already have it! It's also comforting (in a macabre way) that despite having fifty times more people, the US has more than 10 billion fewer records than Jordan (records = what? Likes? Facebook messages? Emails?) They also said they track the "path" of the data, does that mean that a lot of the American records could just be inconsequential movements of network data within the US before it is sent back out or delivered? Looking at this article, it doesn't disprove anything the NSA said. It's a heat map of communications, not people spied on and there's a big difference.