The NSA has been creating maps of American citizens' social networks similar to how the FBI links organized crime families together The NSA has been mapping American citizens' social networks since 2010 The mapping efforts include the gathering of phone, email, Facebook, travel, banking and other records At one point, one mobile phone operator was providing the agency with over 1billion phone records per day The NSA has been graphing American's social networks and plotting them as they do organized crime since at least 2010, according to the latest published Edward Snowden leak. The highly secretive intelligence agency has been mapping out American citizens" social connections - identifying associates, determining locations, and logging who they talk to - by taking advantage of loosened rules previously meant to restrict surveillance actions. As far back as November, 2010, the agency authorized spies to conduct "large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness," the New York Times revealed Saturday. Mapped out: THe NSA has been putting together diagrams of people's social networks similar to how the FBI maps out criminal organizations The agency augmented that information with bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls, property records and tax data, the Times further divulged. There does not appear to be any restriction on the types of data culled, or who it is gather on, the Times noted. First disclosed to the Times by NSA leaker Edward Snowden, the documents provided to the paper did not divulge how many Americans were surveilled, nor do the documents detail who - if anyone - was snagged by the extensive spying. Asked about the agency's spying on Americans, an agency spokesperson told the Times that "all data queries must include a foreign intelligence justification, period." Wanted man: Edward Snowden has been granted a one year asylum in Russia while he continues to leak NSA documents to the press "All of N.S.A."s work has a foreign intelligence purpose," the spokeswoman added. Our activities are centered on counterterrorism, counterproliferation and cybersecurity. The agency's spying was detailed enough to "pick up sensitive information like regular calls to a psychiatrist's office, late-night messages to an extramarital partner or exchanges with a fellow plotter," the Times explained. "Knowing things like the number someone just dialed or the location of the person's cellphone is going to allow them to assemble a picture of what someone is up to," law professor Orin Kerr told the Times. It's the digital equivalent of tailing a suspect. Requests by the agency for this capability date as far back as 2006, when the NSA asked the Justice Department for permission to spy on phone and email data, the Times noted. First denied permission by the Bush administration, President Obama's predecessor green lit the operation shortly before leaving office in 2008, according to the Times. Not long after that, the agency modified policies to permit spying "without regard to the nationality or location of the communicants," the Times reported. Nerve center: An aerial view of The National Security Agency and Central Security Service (NSA CSS) building Additionally, the agency's main phone call and email-linking tool, called Mainway, was being fed at least 1.1billion mobile phone records a day from an unnamed mobile operator during the height of its use in August 2011. GPS services such as TomTom were also used to further enrich the personal mapping of American citizens" daily activities, the paper reported. All of this data can be held for "up to five years online and for an additional 10 years offline for "historical searches," said the Times.