Chalk up your personal e-mail address book as another source of personal information the feds are now tapping in to.

The Washington Post is reporting today that the National Security Agency is collecting hundreds of millions of names on e-mail contact lists and instant messages from around the globe, many of which belong to Americans.

In another leak by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, The Post is reporting that the program grabs e-mail address books and “buddy lists” from instant messaging services. They report that the growing contact list is beginning to include a “sizable fraction” of the world’s entire e-mail and instant message accounts.

In another amazing PowerPoint presentation, the NSA revealed that in a single day, they collected 444,743 address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from others. These numbers correspond to more than 250 million address books per year, or more than the number of web users in the country.

The collections take place overseas, but the feds don’t distinguish between Americans and non-Americans, admitting that the “sweeps” include many Americans – tens of millions of them.

The Post reports:

Contact lists stored online provide the NSA with far richer sources of data than call records alone. Address books commonly include not only names and e-mail addresses but also telephone numbers, street addresses, and business and family information. In-box listings of e-mail accounts stored in the “cloud” sometimes contain content such as the first few lines of a message.

Taken together, the data would enable the NSA, if permitted, to draw detailed maps of a person’s life, as told by personal, professional, political and religious connections. The picture can also be misleading, creating false “associations” with ex-spouses or people with whom an account holder has had no contact in many years.

The NSA has not been authorized by Congress or the special intelligence court that oversees foreign surveillance to collect contact lists in bulk, and senior intelligence officials said it would be illegal to do so from facilities in the United States. The agency avoids the restrictions in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by intercepting contact lists from access points “all over the world,” one official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a classified program. “None of those are on U.S. territory.”