Though National Security Agency Director General Keith Alexander (testifying along with officials from the Justice Department in a rare public oversight hearing by the House Intelligence Committee) claimed that more than 50 terror plots had been discovered and prevented thanks to the NSA's highly classified data collections, doubt surrounds several of his examples.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney said on Fox News Sunday this week that if the National Security Agency's controversial program PRISM — a daily collection of private telephone records and Internet messages — had been in place before the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the terrorists' plot might have been foiled.

The civil war in Syria is a growing source of tension between the United States and Russia.

Though most media have almost disregarded out of hand the government’s daily violations of the Fourth Amendment, they don’t like it when journalists are spied upon.

A task force of 300 U.S. Marines and a Patriot anti-aircraft missile system have been deployed along Syria's border with Jordan as the United States prepares to ship weapons to rebel forces in the two-year-old civil war in Syria that has so far taken an estimated 93,000 lives.

Following news accounts of how the government has been collecting and storing millions of phone call records, e-mail messages and other forms of electronic communications every day, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Thursday greater protections are needed — for the government.

"Nobody is listening to the content of people's phone calls," President Obama said Friday as he sought to allay concern arising from news reports over the previous two days of massive data gathering of citizens' telephone records, e-mail messages, and other private communications by the National Security Agency.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been named Reason magazine's "Nanny of the Month" for May.

The NSA and FBI are "tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person's movements and contacts over time " the Washington Post reported Thursday evening.