The latest disclosures from National Security Agency documents leaked by Edward Snowden to The Guardian show the U.S. government collected bulk “metadata” on the emails of millions of Americans for about 10 years. Under a program that fell under the overall NSA domestic surveillance operation known as “Stellar Wind,” the government swept up information including email accounts and IP addresses, but not the contents of the messages themselves. The program began by targeting emails with at least one party outside the United States, but expanded in 2007 to domestic messages. The Obama administration continued the effort after taking office before shutting it down in 2011. The disclosures confirm the claims of William Binney, the career NSA official turned whistleblower. Binney has said the NSA took an electronic surveillance program he developed, ThinThread, and used it to conduct mass surveillance on a national scale. He resigned from the NSA in 2001 in opposition to what he called illegal spying. According to The Guardian, the collection of Internet metadata appears to have triggered the famed March 2004 confrontation in the hospital room of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft when he refused to sign off on re-authorizing the warrantless surveillance program.