Oddly, the Reuters article and headline changed (and then the moderators appropriately changed the HN headline). That's also why so many of the comments below,

Oddly, the Reuters article and headline changed (and then the moderators appropriately changed the HN headline). That's also why so many of the comments below, particularly those referencing the 300 number, don't make much sense. Here is the lede of the originally linked article: U.S. spy agency paper says fewer than 300 phone numbers closely scrutinized WASHINGTON, June 15 (Reuters) - The U.S. government only searched for detailed information on calls involving fewer than 300 specific phone numbers among the millions of raw phone records collected by the National Security Agency in 2012, according to a government paper obtained by Reuters on Saturday. The unclassified paper was circulated Saturday within the government by U.S. intelligence agencies and apparently is an attempt by spy agencies and the Obama administration to rebut accusations that it overreached in investigating potential militant plots. The administration has said that even though the NSA, according to top-secret documents made public by former agency contractor Edward Snowden, collects massive amounts of data on message traffic from both U.S. based telephone and internet companies, such data collection is legal, subject to tight controls and does not intrude on the privacy of ordinary Americans.