<p>America's National Security Agency is gathering email and instant messenger contact lists from hundreds of millions of ordinary citizens worldwide, many of them Americans, The Washington Post reported late Monday.The US agency's data collection program harvests the data from address books and "buddy lists,'' the newspaper said, citing senior intelligence officials and top secret documents provided by the fugitive NSA contractor Edward Snowden.During a single day last year, the NSA's Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, the Post said, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation.The figures, described as a typical daily intake in the document, correspond to a rate of more than 250 million a year, according to the report, published on the newspaper's website.The NSA declined to confirm the specific allegations in the Post report but defended its surveillance activities as legal and respectful of privacy rights.AFP</p><p><a href="http://www.thestandard.com.hk/breaking_news_detail.asp?id=41895&icid=4&d_str=">Keep reading...</a></p><p>Read also:</p><p><a href="http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=0330014ZBHJ6">NSA Collecting Millions of Contact Lists</a> (NewsFactor Network)</p><p><a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2013/1015/NSA-collects-e-mail-address-lists-Can-users-be-protected">NSA collects e-mail address lists: Can users be protected?</a> (Christian Science Monitor)</p><p><a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/10/15/nsa-yahoo-black-eye/2988599/">Latest NSA revelation is black eye for Yahoo</a> (USA TODAY)</p><p>Explore: <a href="http://news.google.com/news/more?ncl=dQvY8GoGc6E8XvMUmQTI3zzOtQH4M&ned=us">282 additional articles.</a></p>