"Gamification" is an increasingly popular con to trick people into doing horrible things by pretending they are fun games. From dieting apps that bestow badges on users for eating broccoli, to a "virtual incarceration system" that gives prisoners points for adhering to their house arrest, nothing is so unpleasant that bureaucrats and Silicon Valley thinktrepreneuers have been unable to gamify it. Unsurprisingly, the NSA is a big fan of gamification, expertly exploiting humanity's universal love of accumulating points and meaningless trophies in its quest to preserve the world's Facebook status updates and Google searches for future generations of spies.

Bob Schieffer, the elderly moderator of CBS's Face the Nation, once dismissed Edward Snowden as "just a narcissistic young man who has decided he is smarter than the rest of us." Yesterday, Schieffer once again addressed the issues of privacy and the NSA. His performance was an embarrassment to journalism.

Emailing your auntie in Pakistan, or your old roommate in France? The NSA's computers already know.

In a secret intelligence project seen as "more troubling" than the NSA's far-reaching data-mining operations, the DEA has been passing along to other law-enforcement agencies "information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records"—and instructing the agencies to lie about where they got it.

NSA whistleblower and future Aeroflot Gold Member Edward Snowden was granted temporary asylum yesterday by Russia, which allowed him to leave Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, where he'd been trapped since June 23rd. Here's what LifeNews calls the first photo of Snowden in Russia, beaming as he heads to a taxi to escape the airport, flanked by Wikileaks representative Sarah Harrison and his Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena. If you'd eaten airport food for weeks on end, you'd probably be pretty excited to get out of there, too.

FoxNews.com has a handy service post about PRISM-proof messaging and photo applications aimed at upstanding Americans outraged at Obama's spy network, or maybe terrorists. Either one.

The NSA is a "supercomputing powerhouse" with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. The agency turns its giant machine brains to the task of sifting through unimaginably large troves of data its surveillance programs capture.

On Friday, a secret court extended the NSA's authority to collect and store phone records. According to the Washington Post, this is the first time U.S. officials have publicly acknowledged the NSA's cellphone data program.

Two days ago a Redditor who goes by the handle SexualWeasel posted a "quick" drawing he randomly sketched of a proposed logo for the NSA modeled after Pixar's iconic vanity card.

When fugitive NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's United States passport was cancelled on June 23rd, he was left stranded in Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport. Today, Snowden announced he is seeking temporary asylum in Russia in order to plan a possible escape to Latin America. But maybe there's an easier way? Snowden now has a brand-new replacement passport, if he can get it: He has been issued a World Passport, backed by no country but good (its creators say) in nearly all of them.

It's Snowden day at Sheremetyevo! The NSA leaker will meet with human rights groups in the Moscow airport today at 5:00 p.m. (Moscow time). Snowden claims that the U.S. government is attempting to deny his right to seek asylum and violating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

It's not just the U.S.: Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and other Latin American countries are subject to the NSA's wide-ranging data-mining operations, Brazil's O Globo reported yesterday, citing leaked documents from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Edward Snowden, the ex-contractor who leaked NSA documents to the Guardian and Washington Post, has accepted Venezuela's offer of asylum, AFP reports. Update: Or maybe not! The tweet cited by AFP has been deleted.

Terabytes-worth of commentary have been written on the NSA surveillance scandal, all of which now eternally reside on a hard disk silently spinning in a nuke-proof supercooled datacenter Utah. But few writers have captured the unsettling sense of alienation that characterizes the modern surveillance state better than American Pie star Jason Biggs.

Daniel Ellsberg, the man who gave the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971, was the most famous government leaker before Edward Snowden. Today, Ellsberg says that Snowden was right to flee America. No shit!

When Bolivian President Evo Morales' plane was rerouted last night on the suspicion that it was carrying NSA leaker Edward Snowden out of Russia, outraged, frantic South American leaders spent the evening on the phone in an attempt to seek justice.

The Washington Post, the pre-Politico newsletter of choice for The Political Establishment, has the worst opinion section in America. Today, they once again prove why: the paper, which helped to break the NSA Prism spying story, editorializes that the U.S. government must stop Edward Snowden from leaking any more of that awful news.

We still don't know where NSA leaker Edward Snowden, still technically "in transit" in Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport, will end up next. But now that more than a third of the countries from which he's applied for asylum have said "no," we can get a good sense of where he's not going.

In the aftermath of the revelations about the NSA's secret spying programs, there is plenty of anger to go around. American citizens are pissed that they were spied on. European governments are pissed that they were spied on. Nobody, it seems, is happy with being spied on. So why is spying such an accepted institution?

Here's a good journalism #protip: If the main source for your bombshell NSA article is a guy who thinks that President Obama is gay and that President Bush has his poop classified, you may not actually have the scoop you think you do.