Now we know why Angela Merkel was so upset yesterday: According to a report published by the Guardian, the NSA monitored the phone calls of at least 35 world leaders, using phone numbers provided by a U.S. official in another government department.

One day after news broke that the NSA hacked into the Mexican president's email, French paper Le Monde reported that the U.S. spy agency recorded more than 70 million phone calls in France over a 30 day period last year.

The United States has always liked to keep a close eye on its neighbor to the south, making sure that things stay pretty comfortable for U.S. interests. But while former Mexican President Felipe Calderon enjoyed an especially close relationship to the United States, it wasn't enough to stop the NSA from hacking his email account and spying on his whole administration.

In an interview with the New York Times, Edward Snowden said Russian and Chinese officials did not have access to the classified documents he took while working as an NSA contractor. The files were never taken to Russia, Snowden said, because “because it wouldn’t serve the public interest;” instead, Snowden said he gave all copies of the files to the journalists that met him in Hong Kong.

Edward Snowden, last seen grocery shopping in Russia, received a derogatory report in 2009 when he worked at the CIA, where his supervisor suspected him of attempting to access classified files to which he did not have security clearance.

Edward Snowden, living in Russia, must eat. Here he is grocery shopping like a normal person. Strange, since his lawyer had told Fox News that he walks around in disguise, but it seems like he could actually wearing the very same blue shirt he appeared in in that youTube video. Not much of a disguise, unless it's an Edward Snowden costume.

Remember when Al Gore and the Clinton Administration made everyone happy by "reinventing government" back in the '90s, on the principle that government functions would be more efficient if a third-party private intermediary were taking profits on them, because the invisible hand of the free market will always produce optimal results? The New York Times has an update on the operations of USIS, the company born in 1996 with the privatization of the Office of Personnel Management's investigative operations.

It's now a given that the NSA works to grab data from sites like Facebook—but what about the stuff that's explicitly private, the websites guaranteed to be protected and secure? The New York Times reports that American spies have been decoding our scrambled online acts for years.

Russian President Vladimir Putin shook hands (and smiled) with President Obama on Thursday morning at the 2013 G-20 summit in St. Petersburg, Russia, where leaders of major countries were ostensibly meeting to discuss the stability of the global economy. The tense handshake — a controversial trope during Obama’s previous visits to Russia — underscored Putin’s interference with American foreign policy. Up until yesterday, Russia supplied arms to the Syrian government led by President Bashar al-Assad, and Putin has helped stanch a United Nations resolution to sanction military intervention in Syria, while demanding that such a resolution pass before Russia would support a U.S.-led strike.

"Well, it's clear we will not give him up, he can feel safe here. But what's next?" Vladmir Putin said this week about Edward Snowden in an interview G20 summit. The seating order for the G20 summit, which begins tomorrow, has been changed to keep Obama and Putin from having to acknowledge one another.

"You know, I sometimes thought about him, he is a strange guy[...] How is he going to build his life? In effect, he condemned himself to a rather difficult life. I do not have the faintest idea about what he will do next" — Russian President Vladimir Putin on NSA leaker Edward Snowden

A new leak from former security contractor Edward Snowden, published in the Washington Post, reveals the "black budget"—the money spent on the U.S. government's intelligence-gathering operations—for 2013. And it's colossal: A total of $52.6 billion, covering the CIA, the NSA and lesser-known agencies like the National Reconnaissance Office.

The latest drop in the ceaseless downpour of scandalous NSA stories was the revelation that the agency spied on the U.N. That's a grave breach of trust by any standard, a serious scandal. But some vain media cynics will not stop championing the NSA no matter what it does.

Irony, thy name is the First Amendment.

The NSA bugged the United Nations' headquarters in 2012, hacking into its videoconferencing and spying on the diplomatic work of other countries, according to yet another leak released by Edward Snowden, this time published by Germany's Der Spiegel weekly magazine.

The NSA's enormous surveillance system can access around three-quarters of all U.S. internet traffic, snaring in some cases even email sent between U.S. citizens and domestic web phone calls.

According to an NBC News report, an "overwhelmed" National Security Agency still isn't sure which files Edward Snowden took with him when he fled to Hong Kong more than two months ago.

The Brazilian partner of journalist Glenn Greenwald was detained in Heathrow Airport this morning for nine hours, as he was transferring planes on his way back to Brazil from visiting filmmaker (and Greenwald confidante) Laura Poitras in Berlin.

According to internal audits and top-secret documents, the National Security Agency has violated privacy rules thousands of times each year since 2008, when Congress granted the agency increased powers. The documents were provided to the Washington Post earlier this summer by Edward Snowden.