Today at the Justice Department President Barack Obama delivered a speech announcing that the United States will stop collecting and storing phone metadata, even as he defended the programs run by the National Security Alliance. In a rather lengthy speech covering a number of issues related to the NSA's spying programs, the president emphasized that U.S. intelligence agencies have not broken the law and have not spied on the calls or e-mails of "ordinary people."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says that the National Security Agency's claims of secrecy on information that has already been widely released due to leaks by Edward Snowden are overblown and no longer "secret." The advocacy group made its comments in an official response in its ongoing court battle with the agency over the unconstitutionality of its surveillance programs.

Outgoing National Security Agency deputy director John C. Inglis tells National Public Radio that the spy agency would welcome the creation of a public advocate position to take part in Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court deliberations as a check against NSA requests. Inglis, who is retiring after being the number 2 man in the agency for seven years says that an advocate for the constitutionality of requests to be included would be fine as long as it doesn't impede the expediency of the NSA's activities.

According to a Bloomberg report, President Obama will attempt to get out in front of recommendations by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board coming in late January or early February by announcing some changes of his own to the way the National Security Agency currently collects data as part of its massive surveillance programs.

Several states (or at least a handful of state lawmakers) have decided to fight against the federal government's surveillance activities in their own way. In California, two state senators have introduced a bill in Sacramento that would forbid state agencies from cooperating with the National Security Agency to collect "any electronic data or metadata... not based on a warrant." The bill sponsored by state senators Ted Lieu (D-Torrance) and Joel Anderson (R-San Diego), is the first state-level proposal to compel non-cooperation with the federal agency.

A quarter of British and Canadian technology firms surveyed say that they want their data taken out of the United States because of the NSA's unfettered spying activities. The survey was conducted by cloud provider Peer1, which has infrastructure in the U.S., Canada and Britain.

In an interview with Fox News on Friday, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul (R) said that National Intelligence chief James Clapper and NSA leaker Edward Snowden should "share a jail cell," intimating that Clapper is as much a criminal as the former NSA contractor turned whistleblower (or traitor depending on what school of opinion you subscribe to). Clapper testified before Congress denying that the NSA was not engaging in supposed dragnet surveillance of American citizens.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has officially appealed a recent decision by a New York District Court Judge that determined that the National Security Agency's (NSA) wide-scale surveillance of mobile phone data was legal and within the confines of the law. The filing with the Federal Appeals Court could ultimately lead to the case being heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Apple has responded strongly to reports that the National Security Agency claims a "100-percent success rate" in attaching spyware to iOS apps. The revelation about the NSA's targeting of Apple products comes from a recent Der Speigel report featuring leaked documents from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided to various journalists. The NSA program targeting Apple products is called DROPOUTJEEP, and allows the agency to intercept SMS messages, access contact lists, locate a phone using cell tower data, and even activate the device’s microphone and camera.

Cisco Systems, one of the companies mentioned in a Der Spiegel report on the NSA's catalog of backdoors into various networks and technologies, said that it is investigating if the NSA has in some way compromised the networking hardware equipment it provides to companies throughout the world.

According to an article published by Germany’s Der Spiegel newspaper on Sunday, the National Security Agency (NSA) has a catalog of "backdoors" that allows spies to infiltrate equipment from major computing and security vendors including firewalls from Juniper Networks, hard drives from Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor and Samsung, networking gear from Cisco and Huawei, and unspecified equipment from Dell.

On Friday a Federal judge in the Southern District of New York court ruled against the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and in favor of the federal government, saying that the National Security Agency's (NSA) spying activities on American citizens is perfectly legal.

Earlier this week we reported that Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer of Finland-based antivirus provider F-Secure, had publicly canceled a talk (entitled, "Governments as Malware Authors") at the upcoming RSA Conference USA 2014 in protest of news that the RSA received $10 million to make an NSA-favored random number generator the default setting in its BSAFE crypto tool.

Earlier in the week we briefly mentioned former NSA contractor and leaker Edward Snowden's interview with the Washington Post where he noted that his mission "was already accomplished" because the press and the public are talking about the spy agency's various intelligence gathering operations.

Speaking to The Washington Post, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden said that his "mission's already accomplished" after leaking NSA secrets that have caused a reassessment of U.S. surveillance policies. Snowden told the publication in a recent interview published online Monday night that he was satisfied with the results of his disclosure because it has enabled journalists to tell the story of the government's collection of bulk Internet and phone records.

Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer of Finland-based antivirus provider F-Secure, has publicly canceled a talk (entitled, "Governments as Malware Authors") at the upcoming RSA Conference USA 2014 in protest of news that the RSA received $10 million to make an NSA-favored random number generator the default setting in its BSAFE crypto tool.

Google passed along a note letting us know that its petition on the White House web site has surpassed 107,000 signatures. The "We The People" petition calls for the White House and lawmakers to give the stuff we store online the same legal protections (Fourth Amendment) as the stuff we store offline. The petition only needed 100,000 signatures to ellicit a response from the White House at some point in the future, so it is good that it has passed this particular milestone.

Over the weekend the United States government filed documents in two cases (in California's Northern District) related to NSA surveillance - for the first time revealing that its spying activities go all the way back to the days shortly after September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center by terrorists that killed thousands of people.

Verizon says that it wants to disclose all of the various requests it received from law enforcement and intelligence agencies this year, but it has to negotiate with the U.S. government. The company's announcement follows a request by shareholders last month to disclose its dealings with the NSA.

A committee put together by President Barack Obama in August to investigate the government's vast surveillance operations and how it goes about collecting information here and abroad, delivered a 300 page report outlining why U.S. surveillance programs are "broken" and what can be done to fix them. The committee was put together following damaging document leaks about the NSA's various secret spying programs from former NSA contractor Snowden.

At a meeting with President Barack Obama and Vice-President Joe Biden yesterday, executives from America's top technology companies urged the administration to reform the National Security Agency spying programs because they are "damaging their reputations" abroad and could ultimately "harm the broader economy."

Last night on Comedy Central's the Colbert Report, host Stephen Colbert spent a bit of time picking on the idea of the National Security Agency snooping around Second Life. Recently reports revealed that new documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden showed that the NSA was lurking in World of Warcraft, on Xbox Live, and in Second Life (of all places) to keep tabs on terrorists who they believed might be organizing attacks in these virtual worlds. Stephen Colbert poked fun at the recent revelation, showing clips from the game while cracking jokes like this one:

A federal judge ruled on Monday that the NSA's broad and massive surveillance of Americans' phone records is likely unconstitutional, but put aside his decision to allow the government to appeal. U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon ruled in a lawsuit brought by a conservative activist named Larry Klayman that the legal challenge to the massive surveillance program would likely succeed on the grounds that it violates the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Last week we asked our readers, "Do Publishers Know the NSA Is Conducting Surveillance Operations In Their Games?" An overwhelming majority of voters believe that publishers are lying about their knowledge of the NSA's activities in games like World of Warcraft and Second Life, or they are blissfully unaware of what's going on.

An interesting report on Ars Technica reveals that the National Security Agency would continue bulk spying activities even if Congress passes a law forbidding them to do so. In fact, the agency would likely take the fight to court - though which court that would be remains uncertain.

A few days ago we talked about a report that showed that American and British spy agencies are playing World of Warcraft, Second Life and various Xbox Live games to spy on us.

Do you think the publishers of those titles know about the surveillance ops being conducted in their games?

The United States government defended a heavily-redacted response to surveillance requests at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) made by multiple software technology companies including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Facebook and LinkedIn. These companies have been petitioning the special court to allow them to disclose government requests. Under the law these companies cannot disclose this information because it has been deemed "classified."

Eight software technology companies have called on the United States government to limit its spying activities to specific targets, to overhaul the country's secret spy courts, and let service providers publish more detailed information about surveillance requests from the government. Companies signing the letter include Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, AOL, and LinkedIn. The open letter was sent to President Obama and members of Congress as well as being reprinted in a full-page ad in The New York Times and other newspapers.

According to a lengthy report co-published by Pro Publica and the New York Times, American and British spy agencies have infiltrated World of Warcraft and Second Life, conducting surveillance and collecting data in the games played by millions of people around the globe, according to newly disclosed classified documents. Agents supposedly created characters to snoop and to try to recruit informers, and collected data and contents of communications between players, according to the documents disclosed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is warning the public that the "reform bill" being pushed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA.) does nothing to curtail the questionable surveillance activities of the National Security Agency; in fact the watchdog group says that the new bill entrenches many of the practices the NSA is engaging in already.