News of Mass Internet Spying Explains NSA Whistleblower Resignation, Ashcroft Hospital Room Showdown

The latest disclosures from NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden to The Guardian show the U.S. government collected bulk "metadata" on the emails of millions of Americans for about 10 years. Under a program that fell under the overall NSA domestic surveillance operation known as "Stellar Wind," the government swept up information including email accounts and IP addresses, but not the contents of the messages themselves. The Obama administration continued the effort after taking office before shutting it down in 2011. The disclosures confirm the claims of William Binney, the career NSA official turned whistleblower. Binney has said the NSA took an electronic surveillance program he developed, ThinThread, and used it to conduct mass surveillance on a national scale.