The Washington Post appears to have beaten Glen Greenwald's promised but so far non-existant release of NSA details, although their story, " In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are" appears to differ in some details from what Greenwald was rumored to release.
From the above story,
There's some good news for the government. The report provides the public with its first glimpse into actual NSA successes - something heretofore basically nonexistent, and that there is a modicum of effort made to protect the information of US citizens. There's also no evidence so far of targeting political opposition or government officials. (Except perhaps President-elect Obama? The article isn't particularly clear.)The surveillance files highlight a policy dilemma that has been aired only abstractly in public. There are discoveries of considerable intelligence value in the intercepted messages — and collateral harm to privacy on a scale that the Obama administration has not been willing to address.
Among the most valuable contents — which The Post will not describe in detail, to avoid interfering with ongoing operations — are fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks.
Months of tracking communications across more than 50 alias accounts, the files show, led directly to the 2011 capture in Abbottabad of Muhammad Tahir Shahzad, a Pakistan-based bomb builder, and Umar Patek, a suspect in a 2002 terrorist bombing on the Indonesian island of Bali. At the request of CIA officials, The Post is withholding other examples that officials said would compromise ongoing operations.
Many other files, described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained, have a startlingly intimate, even voyeuristic quality. They tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded nevertheless.
But on the damaging side, it also proves that government officials were wrong when they claimed Snowden could not have accessed data intercepts obtained under FISA authorization, which he obviously did (unless we're looking at additional leakers - the Washington Post claims this all came from Snowden). It also highlights how, freed of the need for probable cause and warrants - the NSA has swept up and stored information about huge numbers of Americans and others who were not legitimate targets, and that the government has been lying about the true extent of surveillance. Also, even operating with sweeping authorization, internal communications show that NSA employees regularly folded, spindled, and mutilated the rules they operated under.
In my opinion, we're going to see NSA cheerleaders trumpeting the successful operations, while trying to obfuscate the difference between "targeted" intercepts and the (illegal) mass data dragnets run under different programs. I find it particularly interesting that this information emerges immediately after the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board approved of such targeted programs - before the public at large(and likely parts of the government) had any understanding of how vast even "targeted" surveillance ranged, and how many innocent Americans have their personal information stored by the NSA.
tl;dr - NSA surveillance has had successes, Obama admin lied about extent of targeted surveillance and was wrong (or lied) about what Snowden had access to, massive amounts of personal information on non-targets is permanently stored.