US intelligence agencies tapping directly into the servers of the America’s largest Internet companies where agents can mine untold amounts of data for hints suspicious activity by foreigners or Americans. 

And if any Aussies signed up for social media or other accounts on US Servers, then the online users' lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia says there's a good chance those folks' data was caught in the great electronic net cast by the American spies. 

The ultra-secretive National Security Agency (NSA)  program is code-named PRISM and was first publicly exposed Thursday evening by The Washington Post and The Guardian.

The post says it obtained a top secret document explaining the way PRISM facilitates extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information:  “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”

US law allows for the targeting of any customers of participating firms who live outside the US, or those Americans whose communications include people outside the US.  But it also opens the possibility of communications made entirely within the US being collected without warrants.

This revelation comes a day after Americans learned the U.S. government had compelled telephone giant Verizon to turn over phone records of millions of U.S. customers.