August 21, 2013.

New Details Show Broader NSA Reach

He had brightened up immediately at the mention of Newspeak. He pushed his pannikin aside, took up his hunk of bread in one delicate hand and his cheese in the other, and leaned across the table so as to be able to speak without shouting.

Washington----The National Security Agency----which possesses only limited legal authority to spy on U.S. citizens----has built a surveillance network that covers more Amercans' Internet communications than officials have publicly disclosed, current and former officials say.

"The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition," he said. "We're getting the language into its final shape----the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we've finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words----scores of them, hundreds of them, The Eleventh Edition won't contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050."

The system has the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic in the hunt for foreign intelligence, including a wide array of communications by foreigners and Americans. In some cases it retains the written content of emails sent between citizens within the U.S. and also filters domestic phone calls made with Internet technology, these people say.

He bit hungrily into his bread and swallowed a couple of mouthfuls, then continued speaking, with a sort of pedant's passion. His thin dark face had become animated, his eyes had lost their mocking expression and grown almost dreamy.

The NSA's filtering, carried out with telecom companies, is designed to look for communications that either originate or end abroad, or are entirely foreign but happen to be passing through the U.S. But officials say the system's broad read makes it more likely that purely domestic communications will be incidentally intercepted and collected in the hunt for foreign ones.