Patriot Act

The Obama administration has stepped up the National Security Agency's surveillance program on U.S. soil to search for signs of hacking.

The Patriot Act is gone, sort of.

All the plans purport to end the bulk phone records collection program, but there are big differences.

Rereading the late senator in a post-Edward Snowden and Julian Assange era.

The agency, President Obama, and members of Congress have all said NSA spying programs have thwarted more than 50 terrorist plots. But there’s no evidence the claim is true.

The designation could also make it harder for Syrian refugees to come to the U.S., even if they haven’t actually taken up arms against the regime.

The White House has opposed efforts to rein in NSA snooping, but only five years ago, Senator Obama supported substantial reforms.

The early debate around a key provision wasn’t about anything like mass collection of phone records.

The NSA's eavesdropping and data-gathering may be unsettling, but it's only recently that we've begun to think of our telephone conversations as personal and private.

Has the NSA been collecting all Americans' phone records, what surveillance powers does the government believe it has under the Patriot Act, and other unanswered questions.

Surveillance in the name of intelligence gathering is nothing new. Here's a look back at significant developments over the past 30-plus years.