Jewel v. NSA, a lawsuit filed in 2008 — years before the Edward Snowden leaks — takes the National Security Agency to task for the mass surveillance of AT&T customers' communications.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation successfully pressured the Justice Department to declassify a raft of secret court opinions permitting the NSA to collect millions of Americans’ phone records. In court documents filed on Wednesday, DOJ officials promised to publish the opinions sometime next week.

Federal agents are infiltrating social networks via sneaky friend requests and monitoring them via a special command center, according to documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Who cares? Well, prospective citizens, for one.

With the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle successfully challenged an FBI request to secretly hand over information about the site's users. The FBI had sent Kahle a "national security letter" which requested personal information about a particular user and put Kahle under a gag order. Approximately 200,000 of the secret requests, which need no judicial approval, were issued between 2003 and 2006 after the NSL program was expanded by the Patriot Act. Kahle's case is one of only three the ACLU is aware of where NSL requests were successfully overturned in court. (Photo by David Silver)

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