History and context to the NSA leaks about surveillance of US citizens

[Update #1: I added links to the OnlineBooks site at UPenn for historic materials from the "United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities" and "United States. National Security Agency -- History." OnlineBooks site pulls together digital material from HathiTrust and Internet Archive with items in your library's catalog. Very nice indeed! Thanks John Mark Ockerbloom at UPenn for the suggestion!] There has been an ongoing series of bombshell reports this past week about the recently leaked news that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been collecting wholesale Americans' phone communications, email- and internet traffic in several top-secret programs -- most notably the program called PRISM, which seems to be an outgrowth of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program defunded by Congress in 2003 after a huge public outcry. The best coverage so far has been by the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald and the Washington Post. But there's also been a document dump by the Web group Anonymous (http://pastebin.com/MPpT7xaf) as well as analysis and reports by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Democracy Now. We thought it'd be helpful to point to some library and information resources in an effort to help the Stanford community and the public wrap their heads around the complex issues surrounding the NSA revelations. Laws and government acronyms:

• Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)
• USA PATRIOT Act
• National Security Agency (NSA)
• PRISM
• Total Information Awareness (TIA)

Ongoing news coverage about the NSA and its secret program:

• NSA's Prism surveillance program: how it works and what it can do
• Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations
• NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things' – video
• NSA surveillance: anger mounts in Congress at 'spying on Americans'
• The NSA Files
• U.S., British intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program
• ACLU sues over NSA surveillance program
• National Security Agency coverage from DemocracyNow
• Earlier Denials Put Intelligence Chief in Awkward Position

Library materials and resources to gather news and historical context:

• Subject: United States National Security Agency
• National Security Agency declassified
• Congressional Research Service (CRS) Reports on NSA, FISA and related topics
• United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities
• United States. National Security Agency -- History

Databases:

• Access World News
• Digital National Security Archive
• Lexis Nexis (for both news and analysis from Law Review journals)

Background videos:

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