This is nothing particularly new. This has been going on for seven years under the auspices of the (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) authority and every member of the United States Senate has been advised of this," said Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., the top Republican on the intelligence panel. "To my knowledge, we have not had any citizen who has registered a complaint relative to the gathering of this information, and it is simply what we call 'meta data.'"

The data collected by the NSA included information about the phone numbers involved in calls and the length of the calls and other identifying information, but not the content of the conversation.