The National Security Agency (N.S.A.) is not only collecting our personal phone and email records, but the spy agency is also “exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs” of our social connections. Since 2010, according to the New York Times, the agency has been able to quickly pinpoint our friends, colleagues, locations, traveling companions, and more, spying on our personal social networks.

N.S.A. officials refused to divulge to the NYT how many Americans have been caught up in the effort—including the innocent.  But the data is telling:  In 2011, the program was taking in 700 million phone records per day. In August 2011, it began collecting an additional 1.1 billion cellphone records daily from a US company.

Privacy guru and legal scholar Chris Hoofnagle says the U.S. government has to limit the collection of our personal data by government and by private companies. It’s the only way we can protect the last vestige of our private lives.