This is even more unthinkable than all the other unthinkable stuff that's been previously reported in the Washington Post:

The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials.

By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from among hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot.

When does this bullshit get into illegal territory? Or does the PATRIOT Act just make everything okay?