Via slashdot:
When federal contractor Edward Snowden downloaded a trove of National Security Agency (NSA) secrets onto a thumb drive and flew to Hong Kong, intent on exposing what he felt were gross excesses of the U.S. government’s surveillance programs, he probably had little idea what would happen next—but he certainly hoped that people would listen to him.
And listen they did. Using Snowden’s documents, The Guardian and The Washington Post published articles in summer 2013 that described two massive NSA projects for monitoring Americans; one of those projects, codenamed PRISM, allegedly siphoned infor...