The National Security Administration has been under the microscope lately. The recent news of the extent to which they have been monitoring the public has just come out, and many people are irate at the sheer volume of their private information that is subject to the government's warrantless investigation through its PRISM program.

It's common knowledge that some of the largest internet companies all keep track of and sort through the personal information their users post to those sites. Though many people don't like it, they accept such measures as the cost of being able to take advantage of those websites.

"Google is collecting all that stuff for themselves. Facebook is collecting all that stuff for themselves," Gary McGraw, CTO of software security firm Cigital Inc., told FoxNews.com. "Yahoo is doing the same thing. The question is, how much of it is the government getting?"

Apparently, quite a bit. Google, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo, and Microsoft have all been implicated in a program that allows the government to actively sift through all of the information obtained from these companies. If you use Google, those searches are tied to your IP address and are enough to start an investigation. if you have a Gmail account, they already know who you are.

So far both the government and those companies have denied any wrong-doing. All of the aforementioned companies stated that they do not provide "direct access" to the government for their users' files. Some have said that the responses felt very scripted in nature. At any rate, the government, certainly doesn't deny that it's been sorting through our information.

"[PRISM] cannot be used to intentionally target any US citizen, any other US person, or anyone located within the United States," said James Clapper, the director of national intelligence. "Information collected under this program is among the most important and valuable intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats."

Note the key phrase "intentionally target." The definition of that could be loose enough to say that the government can't look a person up directly, but they can sift through a ton of messages, and when something comes up that is suspicious, they can act. It's not intentional, right? The bottom line is, of course, that they have still searched through all of the info without a warrant.

It doesn't stop there though, because Americans can also be intentional targets. It appears that PRISM protocol allows it to sort through the messages of people if they are a possible associate of a possible terrorist. But you don't even have to have a connection to them, rather, you only have to be linked to someone who has a connection to someone who may or may not be a terrorist, who in fact themselves may be called a terrorist based on their association with a supposed terrorist.

"To collect on a suspected spy or foreign terrorist means, at minimum, that everyone in the suspect's inbox or outbox is swept in. Intelligence analysts are typically taught to chain through contacts two "hops" out from their target, which increases "incidental collection" exponentially," notes an article from the New Yorker.

The whole state of affairs in America lately has been downright sobering, especially considering what President Obama came in claiming he would do. While running for president he derided President Bush's Patriot Act program, but has instead implemented a program with a far greater scope of personal invasion. Is it 2013 or 1984?