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Exactly which data is exposed for each provider?

According to slide 2, all of it. You might be confusing this with yesterday's Verizon story, which was "only" metadata -- caller, sender, time, and duration. This one is "actual" data -- email content, chat text, audio/video of VoIP calls.

(From the article, there's also a parallel NSA program (BLARNEY) that collects metadata only. I don't know why there's two of them).

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Rather, I'm trying to hold onto the idea that my mail is not directly piped, entirely, into a government tracking and storage system. No questions asked, no filters: just everything.

Which is what is probably happening right now.

Let's just say the pipes are there and they have the desire to use them.

BLARNEY is data-mining from IP metadata collected at Internet backbones, which is obviously a far broader net than backdoors at a few specific services.

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