October 2001: Six weeks after 9/11, President Bush signs the USA Patriot Act, which weakens protections against government collection of Americans' communications and personal records.
February 2002: The New York Times reveals that the Pentagon is "developing technologies to give federal officials instant access to vast new surveillance and information analysis systems." Following an outcry from civil libertarians, the Total Information Awareness program is eventually shut down.
March 2004: White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and chief of staff Andrew Card corner Attorney General John Ashcroft in his hospital room, pressuring him to extend the National Security Agency's secret warrantless wiretapping program. The program will be revealed to the public a year and a half later by the New York Times.
March 2006: The Patriot Act is reauthorized.
May 2006: USA Today reports the NSA has been tracking millions of Americans' phone calls with the help of major telecom companies. A few weeks later a former AT&T technician reveals that the company let the NSA tap into its fiber-optic lines in 2002, enabling it to broadly monitor internet and phone traffic in the United States.
September 2007: Microsoft becomes the first major internet firm to cooperate with the NSA's PRISM program, allowing the NSA to collect data on search history, email, file transfers, and live chats. Over the next few years, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, and others become part of the program, which won't be revealed to the public until 2013.
July 2008: Bush signs the FISA Amendments Act, which retroactively codifies the warrantless wiretapping program and compels telecoms and internet firms to give the government access to private communications if one party is "reasonably believed" to be outside the United States. It also gives retroactive immunity to telecoms that handed over customers' private data without a warrant.
January 2009: Google begins giving user data to the NSA under the PRISM program.
June 2009: A federal judge upholds the FISA provision giving telecoms retroactive immunity. The same day, Facebook starts participating in the PRISM program.
March 2010: A federal judge rules that the NSA warrantless wiretapping program is illegal, the second time the program has been found unlawful in federal court. Like the earlier ruling, the decision is later overturned on a technicality.
May 2011: Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who as a member of he intelligence committee has access to classified materials, warns: "When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry."
April-May 2112: A part of a leak investigation, the Department of Justice secretly obtains two months of phone records from multiple Associated Press offices and reporters. The AP's top executive calls it a "massive and unprecedented intrusion into the newsgathering process."
July 2012: In a letter to Wyden, the Office of Director of National intelligence (DNI) acknowledges that some NSA activities have "circumvented the spirit of the law." It also concedes that a federal judge determined some NSA activities to be in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
December 2012: Obama signs a five-year extension of the FISA Act. Amendments that would provide more oversight of mass surveillance are defeated in the Senate.
March 2013: Wyden asks DNI chief James Clapper in a congressional hearing if the NSA collects any information on millions of Americans. Clapper says no.
June 2013: Citing leaked documents from national contractor Edward Snowden, the Guardian reports the NSA has been collecting millions of Verizon customers' call data. A day later, the Guardian and the Washington Post reveal the existence of PRISM. Questions about the revelations, Clapper admits that he lied in his congressional testimony.
August 15, 2303: Based on more Snowden documents, the Post reports that the NSA has "broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year" since 2008, Wyden and Mark Udall (D-COLO.) say the reported violations are "just the tip of a larger iceberg."
August 29, 2013: The Post publishes details of the United States' $52.6 billion intelligence "black budget," more that $18 billion of which is dedicated to CIA and NSA data collection and analysis operations.
September 5, 2013: The New York Times, the Guardian, and Propublica report that the NSA has engineered ways to crack the average person's "everyday communications in the Internet age."
September 9, 2013: Der Spiegel reports that the NSA has the ability to bypass security features of iPhones, Android devices, and BlackBerrys, allowing it to access users' contacts, location data, photos, and possibly credit card numbers and passwords. (Source: AJ Vicens, "Rise of the Surveillance State," Mother Jones, November/December 2013.)
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