The NSA was built to spy, with the uncomfortable question being “on whom?” The agency, long a background player in paranoid cinema like 1998's Enemy of the State, re-entered the public consciousness in 2013 in a big way with revelations from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that the vast surveillance architecture of the NSA was spying on American citizens. Since then, there have been many more revelations from the documents Snowden lifted when he fled the agency and the country. The latest, explored in depth at The Intercept, is this: The NSA, as well as Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ, the NSA's British counterpart), covertly captured video images from Israeli drones. These images also publicly confirm a long-suspected truth, that Israel deployed armed drones.

We're surrounded by eavesdroppers these days--and I don't mean the NSA tapping phones. Our electronic gadgets and gizmos increasingly try to cater to our every whim, including those expressed by voice. It makes sense: Talking is a natural way for people to communicate. A big downside is that electronics have far more indelible memories than people do--and those memories can easily be, and often are, shared far beyond their intended targets.

The National Security Agency still has the authority to collect wide-ranging metadata about your phone calls, at least for now. A controversial bill aimed at reforming the intelligence agency failed to pass the U.S. Senate on Tuesday, with some arguing that it went too far in curtailing the NSA's powers, and others contending it didn't go far enough.

In the high desert near Bluffdale, Utah, there lurks a creature made entirely of zeroes and ones. Called "MonsterMind", the project is an automated cyber weapon, perched atop the data flows into the National Security Agency's Mission Data Repository. According to recent revelations from former government contractor and NSA leaker Edward Snowden, Monstermind is both tremendously powerful and easily fooled. Here's the skinny on the biggest revelation from Wired's recent profile of Snowden. Author James Bamford writes:

Here is your weekly dose of NSA revelations, reported in theWashington Postfrom the classified documents cache released by Edward Snowden: the NSA has a program called MYSTIC that can monitor an entire country's telephone calls - 100 percent of them - and replay them up to a month later. It's actually in use in a country right now, although itcan't be said which one.

The NSA's gathering of Americans' phone call metadata is going to see a few changes. President Barack Obama promised several reforms to U.S. intelligence-gathering activityina speech he gave today, although critics are warning the changes will be minor. The speech was the culmination of a long debate in the U.S. over revelations, stemming from classified documents Edward Snowden handed over to reporters, of the extent of federal surveillance on both Americans and American allies.