Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) is the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Today, she takes a crack at defending the NSA's domestic phone record spying program. She can't come up with one decent justification.

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.

In a report based on another set of documents leaked by Edward Snowden, journalists James Risen and Laura Poitras detail how the NSA has created vast social networks for U.S. citizens through spying on emails, phone calls, and possibly cellular phone call locations.

The NSA employees an enormous team of elite hackers to help them spy on America's adversaries. But even they outsource some of their dirty work to the French.

One of the more obscure institutions to emerge from Edward Snowden’s NSA campaign is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (also known as the FISA court) which, operating in total secrecy, reviews and approves countless secret government orders to monitor and record the communications of Americans — often in tandem with publicly-traded telecommunications firms like AT&T and Verizon. Now that we know the extent to which the FISA courts rulings govern the behavior of telecommunications behemoths, we took a look at the extent to which the court’s judges are personally invested in those very same behemoths. The answer is a lot.

The U.S. considers Israel its "number one counterintelligence threat" in the Middle East. But that doesn't stop the NSA from sharing a veritable fire hose of raw intelligence with Israeli spies, according to a new story from the Guardian.

The National Security Agency today acknowledged that it had for years violated privacy protections during searches of a database containing millions of people's phone records. Not to worry, though, because the breaches weren't malicious. They were simply a result of the fact that nobody at the NSA really knew what the fuck they were doing.

The National Security Agency is able to access most data on all major smartphones, according to reporting from the German news weekly Der Spiegel. Dedicate a SnapChat to them.

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.

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.

"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.

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 Guardian, lately under heavy pressure from the British government, will be teaming up with the New York Times to produce more stories based on Edward Snowden's leaked information about the NSA. Good.

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.

I'm currently reading James Bamford's definitive history of the NSA, Body of Secrets, because I find that scaring the shit out of myself right before bed helps me sleep better. Amid the book's disheartening narrative of our country's endlessly-expanding surveillance apparatus and how the government has found new and exciting ways to abuse it, I learned about something amazing: The United States National Radio Quiet Zone, a massive plot of land where wi-fi and cell phones are banned, that is nonetheless a hotbed of NSA eavesdropping.

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.