President Obama's much-anticipated speech about NSA surveillance reforms is going on now, and he's threading a tiny needle: cheerleading the agency's achievements, while vowing to end its mass-collections of phone records.

Just hours before President Obama's scheduled speech announcing changes to the NSA, the Guardian dropped another Edward Snowden-provided scoop: The NSA collects and stores an average of 194 million text messages per day from around the world, including from people who are not the targets of any investigation.

Since at least 2008, the NSA has used a secret channel of radio waves transmitted from covertly installed computer hardware to monitor about 100,000 computers around the world, allowing the spy agency access to the computers even if they aren't connected to the internet.

According to a report in the Washington Post based on Edward Snowden-provided documents, the NSA is working to build a quantum computer that would be capable of cracking nearly every type of encrypted code in the world, including files for banks, medical facilities, and governments.

It's a small world, after all.

A federal judge ruled on Friday that the NSA's phone surveillance program is lawful, dismissing in the process a lawsuit brought by the ACLU against the federal government.

Senior CBS correspondent John Miller, who anchored 60 Minutes’ glowing profile of the National Security Agency earlier this month, is leaving the network to lead the NYPD’s new counter-terrorism division.

Continuing his recent publicity blitz, Edward Snowden delivered Channel 4 UK's annual "Alternative Christmas Message" yesterday afternoon. As you might imagine, the video is a bleak, Orwell-referencing reminder of the NSA and GCHQ's invasive data-mining operations around the world.

Six months after exposing the NSA's secret surveillance program, Edward Snowden sat down with a Washington Post reporter, and over meals of burgers, pasta, ice cream and Russian pastries, explained that his personal mission has already been accomplished.

Another big Edward Snowden reveal: Between 2008 and 2011, the NSA and British surveillance group GCHQ targeted the Israeli Prime Minister, German government buildings in Berlin, officials from international charity organizations, heads of state from various African countries, and top-ranking European Union officials.

The White House released a critical report on the NSA's data collection programs, suggesting increased regulation and urging President Obama to end the government's practice of logging the metadata from Americans' phone calls.

On Monday, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden penned an open letter to Brazil, praising the country for its strong response to the NSA's widespread data collection and offering to help investigate such programs if Brazil grants him permanent political asylum. Snowden is currently living in Russia on a one-year asylum.

In the latest setback for the NSA, a federal judge ruled on Monday that the spy agency's phone metadata collection program, which gathers information on calls to, from, and within the United States, probably violates the Constitution.

The Guardian has voted Edward Snowden its person of the year, beating out Pope Francis. Meanwhile, Snowden's ex-colleagues have the sads a lot more these days. But one look at your email will probably cheer them up.

Dozens of law enforcement agencies across 33 states are quietly using new technologies to dump phone records and fix thousands of individuals' locations, identities, and activities at a time, using existing cellphone towers and phony cellphone signals, according to a new investigative report.

Ostensibly concerned that terrorists would disguise themselves as gamers in order to secretly communicate, agents from the NSA, CIA, Pentagon and Britain's GCHQ have posed undercover in online realms like World of Warcraft, Second Life, and Xbox Live. In fact, the practice grew so popular with the spy agencies that a special "deconfliction" group was established to prevent the agents from inadvertently spying on or trying to recruit each other.

Now that NSA are the dirtiest three letters in Washington, it appears to be a much less fun place to work than before Edward Snowden detailed exactly the extent to which our communication devices are the agency's playground. According to a new report in the Washington Post, morale is down at the NSA, and its employees are angry at President Obama for not providing a pick-me-up.

Every day, the NSA collects almost five billion records tracing the movements of hundreds of millions of cell phones from around the world, according to report in the Washington Post based on an Edward Snowden-provided classified document.

The NSA has been monitoring the online sexual activity of Muslims as part of a plan to discredit "radicalizers," according to a report in the Huffington Post based on a classified document provided by Edward Snowden.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander offered to resign after Edward Snowden identified himself as the source of leaked classified documents.