Fresh Air called up Edward Snowden in his Moscow apartment and had an hour-long conversation with him. Among the interesting things he talked about is the idea that the combination of surveillance technology and cheap data storage means the NSA is essentially trying to collect all the world’s electronic communications, store them forever, and have them available both to search algorithms and human searchers. In other words, the idea is that an NSA staffer can just type in anyone’s name in the world and pull up any and all of the communications they have ever been involved in.