PRISM

Well, don’t we feel just a little bit ashamed today. While we’ve been whining about trivia like the frightening scope of the NSA’s domestic spying programs – scooping up all our cell phone records, wiretapping American tech companies – the criminally poor oversight provided by rubber stamp lawmakers, and the flagrant lies of top level spooks like DNI James Clapper, the poor misunderstood folks at Ft. Meade have been quietly saving each and one of us from a Chinese plot to destroy all of our computers. Every last one of them.

American intelligence and law enforcement investigators have concluded that they may never know the entirety of what the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden extracted from classified government computers before leaving the United States, according to senior government officials.

Critics of the U.S. National Security Agency’s bulk collection of U.S. residents’ telephone records should offer a better way to track terrorists and protect the country against attacks, the agency’s director said Wednesday.

The NSA’s bulk collection of U.S. telephone records is the “least intrusive” way to track suspected terrorists’ communications with people in the U.S., General Keith Alexander said, defending the NSA’s mass data collection and surveillance programs to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.

It isn’t just online advertisers that benefit from user-tracking cookies. The National Security Agency has been taking advantage of the cookies that companies force on users to pinpoint targets they want to hack, according to newly released Edward Snowden documents.

Where's Waldo? Ask the NSA.

That's right, you can add location tracking to the list of surveillance activities being carried out by the secretive US National Security Agency.

When we look back at 2013 a decade from now, the one technology story that's likely to have the biggest long-term impact is the Edward Snowden revelations.

While there were major password breaches at Adobe, Evernote, and Twitter as well as the Healthcare.gov debacle, nothing rocked the IT world more than the 200,000 classified documents that Snowden leaked to the press, uncovering the NSA's startling digital surveillance programs that reach more broadly across the internet than even many of the most extreme conspiracy theorists would have feared.

Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden succeeded where President Barack Obama couldn't - getting Microsoft, Google and Yahoo to upgrade computer security against hackers.

The United Nations on Wednesday approved 18 draft resolutions, notably "The right to privacy in the digital age," despite opposition from the U.S. government.

It is the first such document to establish privacy rights and human rights in the digital sphere.

The European Commission has called on the US to provide guarantees to restore trust in the wake of revelations of mass internet surveillance by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Until now, trust has relied on the Safe Harbor Privacy Principles designed to ensure US companies respect EU citizens’ right to protection of personal data.

In October, a report surfaced that the US National Security Agency secretly accessed data from tech giants like Google and Yahoo, by way of intercepting the unencrypted traffic flowing between each company's data centers.