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It's not just the texts and audio but images too. 

The National Security Agency is building a comprehensive facial recognition database by intercepting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations, according to top-secret documents, cited by the New York Times. 

According to the NYT report, the agency is collecting 55,000 'facial recognition quality images' per day out of millions being intercepted. 

The N.S.A. document, cited in the report further reveal that 'the spy agency's reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, video conferences and other communications.'

"It's not just the traditional communications we're after" says one 2010 document, "It's taking a full-arsenal approach that digitally exploits the clues a target leaves behind in their regular activities on the net to compile biographic and biometric information that can help "implement precision targeting"."

Report suggested that the agency has so far had mixed results with the accuracy of their facial recognition technology. 

"Facial recognition can be very invasive," said Alessandro Acquisti, a researcher on facial recognition technology at Carnegie Mellon University, according to NYT. "There are still technical limitations on it, but the computational power keeps growing, and the databases keep growing, and the algorithms keep improving."

The revelation of the N.S.A.'s harvesting of images to collect facial pictures is similar to the revelation The Guardian made earlier this year that the British GCHQ intercepted streamed webcam chats from users of Yahoo. Reportedly, 1.8 million users had their privacy compromised and up to 11 percent of the pictures taken contained "undesirable nudity." 

As of now American law doesn't provide specific protections for facial images, However the agency is still required to get court approval for communications collected of American citizens. 

"We would not be doing our job if we didn't seek ways to continuously improve the precision of signals intelligence activities - aiming to counteract the efforts of valid foreign intelligence targets to disguise themselves or conceal plans to harm the United States and its allies," said Vanee M. Vines, the agency spokeswoman, in the report.