Earlier this month we reported that Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) would be hosting a roundtable on government spying this week called "The Impact of Mass Surveillance on the Digital Economy," with leading executives from the tech sector.

If there was ever a seemingly unflappable group of individuals it is America's librarians, who take the privacy of their patrons very, very seriously. Since the introduction of the Patriot Act the group representing our nation's librarians has been fighting to protect its patrons from government intrusion.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) will host a "Chairman's Roundtable" on Oct. 8 to discuss the impact of mass surveillance by the government (through agencies like the NSA) on the digital economy.

Joining Sen. Wyden will be the Executive Chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt; Executive Vice President and General Counsel for Microsoft, Brad Smith; Facebook General Counsel, Colin Stretch ; Dropbox General Counsel, Ramsey Homsany; and Lead Partner at Greylock Partners, John Lilly.

According to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and discussed at length in a new post on the ACLU's official blog by Alex Abdo (a staff attorney in the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project), most of the National Security Agency's (NSA) authority to collect data and spy on both international and domestic targets is derived from Executive Orde

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden has been honored with a Swedish human rights award for leaking classified documents that revealed the NSA vast intelligence gathering operations throughout the world. Snowden will receive the Right Livelihood Award -- often referred to as the "alternative Nobel" -- alongside Alan Rusbridger, editor of British newspaper The Guardian who published a series of articles based on the cache of documents leaked by Snowden to media outlets around the world.

Yahoo announced this week that it wants to release 1,500 pages of documents related to a protracted court battle with the National Security Agency over its participation in the PRISM program. The NSA surveillance program was revealed last summer as part of the Edward Snowden leaks. During that time a leaked slide about PRISM showed that Yahoo was one of the program's first participants, and began contributing to the database in March of 2008.

In an in-depth interview with Wired former NSA contractor Edward Snowden said that the most damaging and damning information about the NSA's spying activities have yet to be revealed. He says that there could be a "smoking gun" hidden within those unrevealed secrets from the cache of classified documents he took from NSA computers.

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden has been approved by the Russian government for another three years, according to Politico, Snowden could return to the United States if he's willing to face charges for leaking thousands of classified documents to the media, but the chances of that happening are somewhere between slim and none.

John Napier Tye, a former State Department section chief for Internet freedom, is calling on the government to answer questions related to a recent op-ed published by the Washington Post.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the American Civil Liberties Union of Idaho announced today in a joint press release that they will join Anna Smith's legal team in her challenge of the government's bulk collection of the telephone records of millions of Americans.

On August 20 of last year, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said that the White House had no information on a story about the UK spy agency GCHQ demanding that newspaper The Guardian destroy a laptop under the government's supervision containing what was believed to be a cache of documents from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

"I’ve seen the published reports of those accusations, but I don’t have any information for you on that…," he said at that time. "The only thing I know about this are the public reports about this."

A new story has emerged based on more leaked documents from the cache of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden concerning how much the data the NSA collects is related to American citizens.

In a not-so-shocking conclusion, the panel put together by President Barack Obama and tasked with examining the privacy and legal fallout from the massive National Security Agency spying activities revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, has concluded in a new 191-page report that the NSA activity was lawful yet "close to the line of constitutional reasonableness."

According to top-secret documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency was authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2010 to spy in one way or another on 90,000 targets in 193 countries. Any country that was not part of the "Five Eyes" group (a joint operation with spy agencies in U.S., England, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) was a potential target.

The U.S. House of Representatives voted 293-123 to cut funding for NSA spying programs that are aimed at Americans. Late last night an amendment to a defense appropriations bill put forth by Reps. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), and Thomas Massie (R-KY) passed with wide support, though it still has to get the same approval in the U.S. Senate.

The US House of Representatives passed a watered down version of the USA Freedom Act today, much to the chagrin of privacy advocate groups that pushed hard for its passage because it had real reforms to the NSA's vast surveillance and information gathering programs. This new version of the bill strips a lot of what was good from the bill and continues to let the NSA conduct business (for the most part) as usual. Rights groups and supporters of the original bill are deeply disappointed with what the House passed today.

Edward Snowden was inspired by video games, according to what one of the key journalists responsible for releasing the details contained in the classified documents leaked by the former NSA contractor tells GQ. Greenwald says that Snowden saw himself as video game hero fighting against an seemingly insurmountable force, much like a video game protagonist does.

East Bay Express has an interesting article on a California Congressional race where votes for the National Security Agency's budget and the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) are taking center stage. Eric Swalwell (pictured, left), the current U.S. Representative of California's 15th District (D), is taking heat from his opponent Democratic State Senate Majority Leader Ellen Corbett.

This week a key House committee approved a package of NSA reforms that would end the spy agency's practice of collecting Americans' phone records. It took lawmakers nearly a year after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden disclosed the program's existence to do something about it.

The House Judiciary Committee voted 32-0 on Wednesday to rein in the NSA with the USA FREEDOM Act. The bill would place new requirements on the government when it comes to gathering, targeting and searching telephone metadata for intelligence purposes.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is calling on the Internet community to support the USA Freedom Act and oppose other "supposed reform bills." The rights group is calling on the Internet community to strongly oppose reform bills like the FISA Improvements Act, which pretends to fix the problems with the NSA's mass surveillance spying programs but instead gives the agency and the government more power to continue spying (like bills from lawmakers like Representatives Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger, and Senator Dianne Feinstein).

The National Security Agency's new director, Admiral Michael Rogers, admits that the agency has lost the trust of the American people in the wake of leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The NSA’s new director made this statement on Wednesday in his first public comments since taking control of the spy agency.

"I tell the [NSA] workforce out there as the new guy, let’s be honest with each other, the nation has lost a measure of trust in us," Admiral Michael Rogers said at a conference of the Women in Aerospace in Crystal City, VA.

A new Time Magazine article notes that comedian John Oliver's new show on HBO, "Last Week Tonight" has done a better job of grilling the National Security Agency (NSA) about warrantless surveillance than the long-running CBS Sunday evening news program "60 Minutes."

A newly declassified order (via Courthouse News) reveals that the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court affirmed the government's authority to collect phone records, rejecting a challenge to the government from Verizon related to its mass surveillance of Americans' call data.

The National Security Agency has denied that it knew about or took advantage of the Heartbleed online security flaw. The U.S. spy agency made the statement following this Bloomberg report that it took advantage of the OpenSSL exploit before it was made public by security researchers.

While it's never good to revel in someone's departure from public service, privacy and internet reform advocates probably can't help to feel some satisfaction in hearing that one of its biggest adversaries in Congress will not seek reelection.

Today President Obama issued a statement announcing plans to push for an adjustment to the National Security Agency's collection of phone metadata, but opponents say his suggestions may not go far enough. The White House offered support for legislation to end the National Security Agency’s bulk collection, instead putting the data into the care of phone companies.

President Barack Obama is expected to put forward a proposal that would end the National Security Agency’s collection of a huge amount of data on U.S. mobile calls, according to what an unnamed Obama administration official told Politico. The proposal is a familiar one: the NSA would eliminate the database of phone data it stores, instead relying on accessing the data from carriers who would be required to store it for up to 18 months.

Top executives from tech companies including Facebook, Google and more are meeting with President Obama today to talk about “issues of privacy, technology, and intelligence,” according to what one White House official tells Politico. The administration declined to provide a list of those attending the meeting.

When the Daily Caller and the San Francisco Gate report a positive in the same story, it doesn't mean that the apocalypse is in full swing; it generally means that something particularly interesting and possibly good has occurred.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) will deliver an address to students at the University of California-Berkeley that paints a dark portrait of the intelligence community as power hungry and out of control, according to excerpts from the speech obtained by Politico.