A 29-year-old technology-infrastructure analyst named Edward Snowden provided the Guardian newspaper a secret court order compelling Verizon Business Services to release to the National Security Agency metadata from all customer phone calls on an “ongoing daily basis,” and revealed that the NSA has since 2007 been authorized to collect chat transcripts, emails, and media from servers owned by Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple.