[somenameforme]

You're confusing section 215 of the "Patriot Act" - later on the "USA FREEDOM Act" (don't you love the names) with PRISM. The two are quite different spying acts. The USA FREEDOM spying is where the whole metadata only debacle came from.

From the Wiki which references the NSA's own slides, PRISM offers: "extensive, in-depth surveillance on LIVE [emphasis mine] communications and stored information" with examples including email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP chats (such as Skype), file transfers, and social networking details.

One of the leaked documents is a training manual for spying on Skype calls, which are routed right on over to the NSA. It even had a technical support FAQ which includes issues like understanding why messages are being repeated - they're being synched to another device which resends everything, or how to most effectively spy on a user using multiple IDs. It was quite user friendly!

The entire scope of the NSA is really quite absurd. They even had/have spies installed in World of Warcraft [1]. It's all quite dystopic but it often feels like we're stuck closer to Brazil than 1984.

[1] - https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/12/ns...