In a "high-octane speech" two years ago today, Ecuador granted Wikileaks demiurge Julian Assange political asylum, adding that he may stay in their London embassy for "two centuries." That would certainly be a long time, but haven't we each spent much longer trapped in the Ecuadorian Embassies of our own certitude?

NSA chronicler, James Bamford, author of voluminous unofficial accounts of the agency's history, spent three days in Russia with Edward Snowden for WIRED. Newsworthy aspects aside, we learn that Snowden makes librarian-type shushing gestures to strangers who recognize him. Classic Bill Murray.

A new, disturbing, and vitally important report from The Intercept has revealed documents proving that more than 40 percent of the U.S.'s Terrorist Screening Database, or 280,000 people, had "no recognized terrorist group affiliation." This is news. The fact that it came from a mysterious "New Snowden" is not. Right?

Bodacious waves in the Arctic, 16-feet high and rising, are likely to hasten climate change, according to a paper in the new issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

Innovation did not die with Steve Jobs. Apple has quietly installed data discovery software, including a file-relay tool that can bypass backup encryption, in around 600 million iPhones, iPads, and other devices running their latest iOS. You are correct to surmise that this has been a boon to law enforcement.

Few mainstream media outlets have had the courage to show what's really going on inside the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Greenpeace's protest blimp, where invisible particles are moving — far from public scrutiny — in what scientists describe as total chaos.

That mysterious wait is over! At zero dark one last night, Glenn Greenwald's media venture The // Intercept posted the long-promised results of their ongoing investigation into which specific U.S. civilians were targeted by the NSA's most invasive surveillance programs.

Fiji, Mali, San Marino, Trinidad and Tobago, Papua New Guinea, Kiribati: These are easy nations to spy on, just to juke the stats.