The disclosures

1. 2013June 5, 2013Surveillance & Privacy

   The Guardian publishes a secret court order for every Verizon call record

   The order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court required Verizon to hand over the records of all calls on its network, including local calls, every day, and barred the company from saying so. It was the first of the documents from Edward Snowden.

   Source: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court secondary order to Verizon Business Network Services (April 25, 2013)Read the full story →
2. June 6, 2013Surveillance & Privacy

   PRISM slides published

   NSA slides describe collection directly from the servers of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple, at a cost of about $20 million a year.

   Source: PRISM/US-984XN overview slides (April 2013)Read the full story →
3. June 9, 2013Surveillance & Privacy

   Edward Snowden identifies himself as the source

   A 29 year old contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton at an NSA facility in Hawaii, he asked the Guardian to name him.

   Source: Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelationsRead the full story →
4. August 16, 2013Surveillance & Privacy

   NSA audit shows 2,776 rule violations in a year

   The Washington Post published the agency's own quarterly oversight report from May 2012. Most of the incidents were database queries that went wrong through human error.

   Source: NSAW SID Intelligence Oversight Quarterly Report, first quarter 2012 (May 3, 2012)Read the full story →
5. September 2013Surveillance & Privacy

   New York Times reveals Hemisphere

   Never refer to Hemisphere in any official document.

   Source: Hemisphere: Law Enforcement's Secret Call Records Deal With AT&TRead the full story →
6. September 5, 2013Surveillance & Privacy

   BULLRUN: the NSA's program against internet encryption

   A classification guide lists the agency's capabilities against TLS/SSL, HTTPS, SSH, VPNs, VoIP, and webmail.

   Source: Project BULLRUN classification guide (June 16, 2010)Read the full story →
7. October 30, 2013Surveillance & Privacy

   MUSCULAR: the NSA taps the lines between Google's data centers

   A hand drawn slide marks the spot where encryption is added and removed, with a smiley face.

   Source: Special Source Operations slide, Current Efforts - GoogleRead the full story →
8. 2014October 16, 2014Surveillance & Privacy

   FBI director: encryption leads to a very dark place

   The bureau asks for a way through it.

   Source: Going Dark: Are Technology, Privacy, and Public Safety on a Collision Course?Read the full story →
9. 2019March 28, 2019Surveillance & Privacy

   Inspector general: DEA never did a legal analysis of its bulk collection

   Agents told to keep it out of court filings. 16 recommendations.

   Source: DOJ OIG Releases Report on the Drug Enforcement Administration's Use of Administrative Subpoenas to Collect or Exploit Bulk DataRead the full story →
10. December 17, 2019Surveillance & Privacy

    Secret court asks whether any FBI application can be trusted

    17 errors and omissions in the Carter Page applications.

    Source: Order, In re Accuracy Concerns Regarding FBI Matters Submitted to the FISC (Misc. 19-02)Read the full story →

Stories (3)

• 2013 to 2018What Edward Snowden's NSA Documents RevealedIn 2013 a contractor at the National Security Agency gave reporters thousands of internal documents. They show the government collecting the phone records of every Verizon customer, taking email and files from the servers of Google, Facebook, and Apple, working to break the encryption that protects the internet, and logging thousands of violations of its own rules in a year.Surveillance & Privacy
• 1992 to 2024Project Hemisphere: How Police Searched Trillions of AT&T Phone Records Without WarrantsFrom 2007 to 2024 the White House drug office paid AT&T to let police search a database of the company's call records that went back to 1987 and grew by four billion records a day. Any officer with a subpoena could use it, and many agencies write their own subpoenas. The training slides told officers never to mention the program in an official document. The New York Times found it in 2013. The funding was suspended, the program was renamed, and it was started again in 2017 and again in 2022. The Justice Department's inspector general found in 2019 that the DEA had never done a full legal analysis of it, or of an earlier program that collected the records of Americans' calls to as many as 116 countries from 1992 to 2013. In 2022 two senators disclosed that the CIA had been running its own bulk collection program with no statute behind it.Surveillance & Privacy
• 1978 to 2026The Secret FISA Court: Rubber-Stamped Wiretaps and Systematic FBI Errors in Carter Page and Section 702 WarrantsSince 1978 a court that sits in secret, hears only the government, and publishes almost nothing has approved the surveillance of Americans. In 2025 it received 287 applications and denied four in full. When its opinions have been declassified they have recorded the government misleading it: in 2011 a judge wrote that the NSA's admission that it had been collecting tens of thousands of wholly domestic emails a year was the third instance in less than three years in which the government has disclosed a substantial misrepresentation regarding the scope of a major collection program. In 2019 the court found the FBI's applications to wiretap an American had contained 17 significant errors and omissions and asked whether any of the bureau's applications could be trusted; an audit of 29 more found errors in every one. In 2022 it found the FBI had run more than 278,000 improper searches of Americans. In April 2026 a court found the bureau still violating the 2024 law.Surveillance & Privacy