Newly leaked documents show a large percentage of electronic communications intercepted by the NSA is from ordinary Internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, according to a new report from the Washington Post.

The Post bases its assessment on the results of a four-month-long investigation and examination of 160,000 email and instant message exchanges provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden, and it reveals that as many as 90 percent of those whose data was collected were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.And many of those individuals were American citizens.

Edward Snowden.

While some of the information collected and retained was relevant to the NSAs operations, a large portion of the conversations intercepted involve irrelevant accounts of individuals going about their daily lives, according to the Post. Other tidbits of data collected include photos of peoples children.

The report notes that this sort of incidental collection is impossible to avoid, but the Post also states that in other contexts the U.S. government works harder to limit and discard irrelevant data. For example, the FBI works to avoid listening in when a suspects family member uses a wiretapped phone.

The NSA, on the other hand, makes no such distinction between relevant and irrelevant information, the report says, because the agency feels that it is difficult for one analyst to know what might become relevant to another.

This is but the latest revelation on the nature of the NSAs surveillance programs. Previous leaks highlighted a massive facial recognition program, as well as the bulk collection of phone call metadata and email records, among other things.And this new leak will likely only intensify fears that government surveillance will put a damper on the open Internet, a concern highlighted in a recent study from the Pew Research Center.Visit the Washington Post for the full report.

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Latest Snowden leak: Most data NSA collects is from non-targets

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -

Heaps of baby photos, fitness selfies, medical records and resumes are among thousands of private communications scooped up and stored by NSA spy programs.

That's according to new disclosures based on documents Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, gave to The Washington Post -- disclosures that show just how easy it is for Americans' private conversations to be swept into the spy agency's traps.

Snowden provided the Post with what it said were 160,000 intercepted conversations, including e-mails, instant messages, photographs, social network posts and other documents. The trove included messages exchanged from 2009 through 2012, and some were hundreds of pages long.

Nearly 90% of the individuals -- or accounts -- whose information was obtained were not federal targets, but rather ordinary Internet users, a Post analysis found. Some had visited online forums in which targets chatted, or exchanged e-mails with a target, and "were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else," the Post reported.

Some were identified by either the government or newspaper as Americans. It said NSA analysts censored 65,000 references to Americans' names, contact information or other details. The paper found almost 900 "unmasked" e-mail addresses "that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S. residents."

The Post said the agency's standards for classifying someone as a foreigner could apply to "tens of millions of Americans," such as those who log into an e-mail account when traveling outside the country or use proxy servers located outside the U.S.

At least one subject was classified as foreign simply because the person communicated in a foreign language.

CNN's inquiries of the NSA were not answered on Sunday. The Post said it withheld several significant conversations that were within the documents at the request of unnamed government officials.

Past revelations based on Snowden-provided documents have shown how the U.S. government taps private accounts, scoops up personal data and hacks Internet security measures. Sunday's disclosure sheds light on what the government collects through some of those efforts.

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Thousands of intercepted conversations provided by Edward Snowden