With all that fun British phone hacking news, you may have missed some exciting phone surveillance news here in the States. The NSA's lawyer says the U.S. government might have the authority to physically track Americans with their cell phones.

Not to be outdone by the National Archives, which is releasing a redacted version of the Pentagon Papers 40 years after they were actually published, the National Security Agency today declassified a book on cryptology that was published in 1809, during the presidency of James Madison. If it had been leaked before the NSA was ready, we totally would have lost the War of 1812.

You know what's kewl, kids? The National Security Agency sure does: it's making codes, cracking codes, hanging out in Qatar, and monitoring the online activities of your loved ones constantly. The NSA's totally boss cartoons will school you.

The pervs at the SEC can relax, because now the attention is on the defense and national security communities, where downloading child pornography on government computers is what happens when government officials aren't fighting the war on terror, apparently.

A new NSA surveillance program (contracted to Raytheon) will monitor for cyber-attacks on critical infrastructure. Sounds okay, right? So why is it called "Perfect Citizen"? And why did Raytheon send an email reading "Perfect Citizen is Big Brother"?

A federal judge ruled yesterday that the N.S.A.'s covert wiretap program targeting who knows how many US citizens without court approval was (and is!) illegal. Of fucking course it is, come on. But...but...but what if Obama does it?

A National Security Agency director just bragged to a Senate subcommittee about his agency's close "cooperation" with Microsoft to, err, "enhance" how Windows 7 guards a user's privacy. Doesn't that just make you feel all warm and fuzzy?

Another Friday afternoon (in spirit!), another "Obama admin continues Bush admin-era 'national security' policy" story. This one is a mysterious NSA program called, ominously, "Einstein 3."

Congresswoman Jane Harman took to the airwaves to defend herself against the charge that she conspired with a "suspected Israeli operative" to quash an espionage prosecution against former AIPAC employees. It didn't go so well.

How many hot-buttons does the news that the NSA wiretapped Congresswoman Jane Harman involve? Let's count: 1) public corruption, 2) "Israel Lobby" espionage, 3) intelligence agencies spying on lawmakers and 4) Bush's hyper-politicization of everything.

The Bush administration will be remembered for breaking the law to spy on Americans. One lawyer will be remembered for blowing the whistle.

Why did the citizen-spying National Security Agency pay Google $2 million? According to a contractobtained through the Freedom of Information Act and parsed by Blogoscoped, the NSA purchased "four Google search appliances, two-years replacement warranty on all of them, and 100 hours of consulting support." I know, kind of a letdown. But we sincerely hope that won't stop the conspiracy theorists from creating another paranoia-fueled video like the classic we've embedded below.

The website of the National Security Agency went down yesterday. No, it wasn't subject to "cyber terrorism," just bad network management — specifically, its domain-name servers, according to Arbor Networks' Danny McPherson. But don't worry, everyone, the site is back up! Still, the fact that it sports a Flash interface doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the engineering ability of our information overlords. (Photo by Ryan Lackey)

Head honcho of the federales, Robert Mueller, let his fantasies run wild in hearings held by the House of Representatives' Judiciary Committee on Wednesday:

There's an ulterior motive to opening an official backchannel at a tech conference. It pulls all the dissenters into a virtual room, where they disseminate their snide remarks safely away from the real discussion.