March: Wyden asks DNI chief James Clapper in a congressional hearing if the NSA collects information on millions of Americans.

June: The Guardian reports that 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. Now under pressure from the revelations, Clapper admits that he lied in his congressional testimony.

June: “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That’s not what this program’s about,” Obama says at a speech in Silicon Valley. “But by sifting through this so-called metadata, they may identify potential leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism.” He adds, “”You can’t have 100 percent security and then also have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience.”

August 15: Based on more Snowden documents, the Post reports that the NSA had “broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year” since 2008. Sens. Wyden and Mark Udall (D-Colo.) say the reported violations represent “just the tip of a larger iceberg.”

August 29: The Post publishes details of the United States’ $52.6 billion intelligence “black budget,” more than $18 billion of which is dedicated to the CIA and NSA data collection and analysis operations.

September 5: The New York Times, Guardian, and ProPublica report that the NSA has engineered ways to foil virtually all encryption protecting the average person’s “everyday communications in the Internet age.”

September 9: Der Spiegel reports that the NSA has the capability to bypass security features of iPhones, Android devices, and BlackBerrys, allowing it to access contacts, location data, photos and perhaps credit card numbers and passwords.

November 14: The New York Times reports that the CIA is covertly collecting bulk records of international financial transactions under the same laws that allow for the NSA’s bulk data collection, suggesting that the full scope of the US government’s bulk data collection efforts are unkown.