How big is big? Big enough to be click bait? Maybe not quite even that. Let’s look at what that meant to us, real user of these companies. say about 200 million of us. That’s just a fraction of the US population. At most if I got the math right about your risk of getting looked at is .02% Or .004% if you use a one billion users number. Small odds indeed and nothing anyone could truly call intrusive.

Whether this program is effective only time and perhaps history will ever be able to say.

Four tech giants embroiled in the government’s secret PRISM collection program reported today that they had received classified national security demands for the contents of at least 59,000 user accounts during the first half of 2013.

Google reported that it received FISC requests for content on between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts during the same period.

In the case of both companies, the number of accounts affected far outweighed the number of requests they received, indicating that at least some of the requests involved data on multiple user accounts. Google, for example, received less than 1,000 requests that encompassed 9,000 user accounts, while Yahoo also received fewer than 1,000 requests, but these affected more than 30,000 accounts.

Google did, however, provide statistics on FISA requests for previous years, allowing the public to see how the number of requests have dramatically grown. During the first six months of 2009, for example, the company received requests that affected fewer than 3,000 accounts. But that number has grown by about 1,000 every six months thereafter.

Facebook and Microsoft also released transparency reports today. Facebook said it had received requests for content on between 5,000 and 5,999 user accounts for the first half of 2013, while Microsoft disclosed that it had received requests that affected between 15,000 and 15,999 accounts.

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More: In Just 6 Months, the NSA Spied on More Than 59,000 Accounts