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NSA revelations: A timeline of what's come out since Snowden leaks began

Since Edward Snowden's first published leak about National Security Agency surveillance techniques appeared in The Guardian on June 5, new revelations have been steadily trickling out. Here's a look at what we've learned since June, broken down by 16 key dates. 

Oct. 30, 2013

Google/AP
The NSA has allegedly tapped into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world.

The Washington Post first reported that the NSA and the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) had tapped into internal communications connecting Yahoo and Google’s overseas servers, according to documents leaked by Snowden. The two agencies had been copying e-mails and other information passing between the big data centers, the documents said. Both tech giants said that they had suspected that the agencies might be snooping but had not consented to the agencies’ secret oversight.

Why is this important? The incident highlighted the vast reach of the NSA and its British counterpart, suggesting that the agencies could spy on even tech powerhouses with formidable defenses in place. In the days after the news, Yahoo and Google, as well as other major data collectors such as Facebook and Twitter, expressed outrage at the revelations and said they would create stronger bulwarks against prying government eyes.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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