surveillance

The NSA's ability to collect mass amounts of phone data might be coming to end as a bill on the topic moves through Congress. A former CIA head says it's a necessary check against abuse, but one journalist thinks the agency has moved beyond the program altogether.

A new bill that will increase intelligence-gathering was passed in the French parliament today. This is not making supporters of civil liberties and privacy in France happy.

Both French and American authorities are facing serious questions over the failure to prevent this week's Paris siege. The answers may be matters of intelligence and diplomacy — but they could also come down to simple matters of time and money.

Surveillance was all over the news in 2014, and we learned plenty of new ways governments and companies have found to track everyday users. Here's a list of eight ways we found out our privacy was under attack this year.

From the Sony hack to #BringBackOurGirls, here are the top international security, privacy, digital diplomacy online activism and cyber-warfare stories of 2014.

Edward Snowden's biggest legacy may not come from changed laws or powers — it may just be the way that the debate over privacy has forced big companies like Apple and Google to safeguard its customers' information in more ways.

Facebook said this week that governments are upping their demands for user data, renewing the focus on Internet privacy. But in the UK, the intelligence community's position is clear: The Internet is a breeding ground of crime and terror, and privacy should take a backseat.

We all know the saying about Vegas, but be aware that all of things that stay in Vegas still end up in the huge data repositories of casinos. Adam Tanner's new book tracks how they're vacuuming up every bit of information they can on their customers to keep people coming back.

This is the story of Bob and Jacqui — Bob Lambert was a British police spy who worked in counterterrorism and Jacqui fell in love with the man she thought was a Greenpeace activist. Now, decades later, their relationship is at the center of a lawsuit over "rape by the state."

WeChat does it all for almost 400 million users, from texting to paying bills. Now China's government will force Chinese users to register using their real names, sparking fears that the order is an attempt to clamp down on speech and privacy.