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

Lars says that it #39;s time for Edward Snowden to come home and face the music...
Lars on America #39;s Newsroom 05/29/14.

By: Lars Larson

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Lars says that it's time for Edward Snowden to come home and face the music... - Video

TIME Politics Congress Edward Snowden and the NSA Can Both Be Right US National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden speaks to European officials via videoconference during a parliamentary hearing on improving the protection of whistleblowers, at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, eastern France, on June 24, 2014. Frederick FlorinAFP/Getty Images Two reports raise the possibility that on balance, both the NSA collection programs and Snowdens revelations have done more to advance the public good than to harm it

The yearlong debate over the leak of National Security Agency documents by former contractor Edward Snowden has divided the world into two camps. One sees Snowden as a patriotic public servant and believes the NSA programs he revealed are unjustified threats to civil liberties. The other sees Snowden as a traitor and views the NSA programs as necessary for national security.

Two reports this week raise a third possibility: that on balance, both the NSA collection programs and Snowdens revelations have done more to advance the public good than to harm it.

On July 1, the independent agency charged with overseeing U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism programs to ensure they dont infringe on privacy and civil liberties found the core of the NSAs Internet collection programs did neither. In a 196-page report, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board found both the NSAs collection of Internet traffic from service providers, and the agencys tapping of undersea cables, complied with the Constitution and Congresss privacy protections for U.S. persons, and were therefore legal. It further found that the programs were valuable (two board members called them extremely valuable) for foreign intelligence and counterterrorism:

Presently, over a quarter of the NSAs reports concerning international terrorism include information based in whole or in part on Section 702 collection.

On the other side of the equation, the PCLOB report comes less than a week after Adm. Michael Rogers, the head of the NSA, told the New York Times that while the damage done by Snowden was real, he did not believe the sky is falling as a result. Earlier in June, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the Washington Post that we think that a lot of what [Snowden] looked at, he couldnt pull down, and that it doesnt look like [Snowden] took as much as first thought.

Taken together, the reports raise the possibility that the NSA programs continue to contribute to U.S. national security and that the damage done by Snowdens leaks is offset by the public awareness of and debate about surveillance.

There are, of course, qualifiers to such a best-of-both-worlds view. For starters, the PCLOB report raised concerns about how the NSA, CIA and FBI search the data once it is collected from the Internet and recommended in some cases curtailing those searches. In January, the PCLOB found that the NSAs telephone metadata records program was effectively illegal and should be ended. And no one can seriously look at the Snowden revelations without considering the possibility that they damaged national security. A large majority of security experts recently polled by National Journal believe the damage caused by the leaks is greater than the public value of Snowdens revelations.

But the PCLOB said it had not seen any evidence of bad faith or misconduct in either the NSAs Internet collection program or the telephone metadata program: for all the speculative fear of a dystopian future, no one has been maliciously targeted, and the programs havent been hijacked by a malevolent Nixonian seeking political advantage. At the same time, Snowdens revelations have initiated a broad, bipartisan public debate over government surveillance, and he has advanced the idea that in the digital age, privacy is always in play (including the commercial collection and sale of data on virtually every household in the country, as the Federal Trade Commission recently reported).

This may all sound Panglossian, but it fits with the conclusions of the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, scourge of secrecy, who believed there were many things that should be made secret, but then released as soon as the immediate need has passed. Standing at the threshold of the digital age in 1997, Moynihan declared:

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Edward Snowden and the NSA Can Both Be Right - TIME