By Justin Elliott, ProPublica In the months following the October 2001, passage of the Patriot Act, there was a heated public debate about the very provision of the law that we now know the government is using to vacuum up phone records of American citizens on a massive scale. ...read more

(UPDATE below) It's now been more than a week since Glenn Greenwald reported that the National Security Agency attained "direct access" to servers owned by the various tech giants, Google, Facebook, Apple and so forth. And it's been almost a week since other sites, now ...read more

(UPDATE below.) I'm going to put it all out there and let the chips fall where they may: I'm increasingly convinced that Glenn Greenwald's reporting on the NSA story is tainted by his well-known agenda, leading him to make broad claims for the purposes of inciting outrage. ...read more

(UPDATE below.) It turns out, the NSA PRISM story isn't quite the bombshell that everyone said it was. Yes, there continues to be a serious cause for concern when it comes to government spying and overreach with its counter-terrorism efforts. But the reporting from Glenn ...read more