People either really, really love the Central Intelligence Agency or really, really fear it. It's hard to tell which.

The unspooling revelations of what exactly the NSA has been up to are proof that sometimes, the paranoid lunatics are absolutely correct. Today we learn that the spy agency has been recording 100%—all!—of the phone calls made in an entire country.

It's a small world, after all.

A federal judge ruled on Friday that the NSA's phone surveillance program is lawful, dismissing in the process a lawsuit brought by the ACLU against the federal government.

A virtually unregulated class of companies that sells consumers' personal information to marketers is using new technology to dive deeper than ever—peddling quasi-legal lists of alcoholics, addicts, depressives, rape victims, and even "Hispanic payday loan seekers."

In the latest setback for the NSA, a federal judge ruled on Monday that the spy agency's phone metadata collection program, which gathers information on calls to, from, and within the United States, probably violates the Constitution.

We hear a lot about how valuable our personal information in the age of social networking. There are all these tools to help us calculate how much our Twitter account is "worth" and movements to get Facebook to pay for our data. But, it turns out, our personal information is just worth pennies to the largest…

An Idaho high school girls basketball coach says she was fired for posting a vacation photo on her personal Facebook page showing her fiancé grabbing her right breast.

As the head of Facebook, with over one billion active users, Mark Zuckerberg probably has more influence on information technology than any one person alive. Now a couple of information scholars have archived his every public utterance into a massive archive they're calling the Zuckerberg Files.

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.

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.

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…

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 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.

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.

Journalists are generally human disasters: stimulant-addled, barely-functional hoarders unable to focus on anything other than scrabbling after the next story with an addict's claw-handed fury. I type this encased in the stale, coffee-stained shirt that proves it. Journalists, in other words, are the people least…

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.

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.

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 …