As revealed by agency documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the NSA is hungry for information on the Internet. Under programs like PRISM, it taps Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and Yahoo to look at the communications of a literally unknowable number of their users. (It's classified.)

It's inherently hard to talk about how the NSA gets this information because it obtains classified orders for surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which is administered by a secret court. Anyone who gets a FISA order is legally obliged to keep mum about it.

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After it was revealed two weeks ago that the National Security Agency collects domestic emails, chats, photos, and call records through two surveillance operations, PRISM and BLARNEY, hundreds of Americans filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to find out what of their personal data has been gathered.

If the NSA’s response to one such request from San Francisco-based web developer Jarrett Streebin is any indicator, those FOIA filings will likely be in vain.

“To the extent that your request seeks any metadata/call detail records on you and/or any telephone numbers provided in your request, or seeks intelligence information on you, we cannot acknowledge the existence or non-existence of such metadata or call detail records,” the agency wrote Streebin.

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Many of the hacks perpetrated by Anonymous are pretty straight-forward. Whether you agree with the hacktivist group’s methods or not, they are at least comprehensible. The latest “op” however really is baffling.

LulzSec Albania, a group of Albanian hackers associated with the LulzSec group of Anonymous allies, have hacked the Swiss Chamber of Commerce in Canada. Nope. You didn’t just have a stroke.

The website of the Swiss Canadian Chamber of Commerce, which was developed using PHP, had a vulnerability to a confirmed SQL injection flaw, which is how the hackers struck.

They stole a database containing names and login information, which the group released on Pastebin.

What was the motivation? The hackers themselves say “for the lulz.”—but what lulz?

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Wait, it gets even more shocking: Shyamalan lied.

Or so claims the writer who says he really penned She's All That.

In the 2000s, Shyamalan never shied away from the limelight, especially when it came to promoting the works of M. Night Shyamalan. But after a series of increasingly gratuitous cameos, high-profile flops, and the lasting damage done by the bizarre staged documentary that accompanied the release of 2004’s The Village, Shyamalan stepped out of the spotlight for a while, even allowing producer-star Will Smith to take the blame for Shyamalan's latest bomb, After Earth.

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In Africa, the market for cellphones is growing about 20 percent per year. Nowhere is this clearer than in Kenya, where 93 percent of households now own mobile devices. According to an article by Noel Jones in Genesis Block, this makes the country a prime candidate for widespread adoption of the all-digital currency, Bitcoin.

Like much of Africa, Kenya is without a robust technical infrastructure. For years, many Kenyans have relied on personal mobile technology for much of their communication and commerce.

Since 2007, the telecom provider Safaricom has run a mobile payment service called M-Pesa (the “M” stands for “mobile” and “pesa” is Swahili for “money”), which allows Kenyans to transfer funds and pay bills using only their cellphones. Recently, M-Pesa has gained widespread adoption—more than 30 percent of the country’s GDP now moves through the service. In turn, stores and restaurants have adapted to allow customers to pay with their M-Pesa accounts. The result is a country ideally suited for Bitcoin.

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Outside of excited tweets about #GaryNeal! and #DannyGreeeeeeen, the Internet didn't have much to talk about Tuesday. Heat superstar James was pedestrian, the Spurs went about their business, and that fight between the Dodgers and Diamondbacks looked more like an even competition.

There was, however, the curious case of singer Sebastien De La Cruz, and the racist tweets that accompanied his presence.

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All in the same week a former CIA worker leaked evidence of a secret government program that spied on users of major social networks and search engines. Coincidence?

Reports of a 7,000 percent increase in sales for 1984 in a 24-hour period are a bit overblown. The spike was a bit smaller than that, and only for one edition—the Centennial. Still, with Amazon not openly involved in PRISM, customers can rest easy knowing their samizdat purchase was not reported to the intelligence community.

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Just what is PalTalk, and why are intelligence agencies listening in on it?

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Recently released National Security Agency documents indicate the U.S. government is “tapping directly into the central servers” of your favorite Internet services as part of a secret program called PRISM.

So much for those privacy policies, huh?

The Guardian and Washington Post revealed the stunning extent of the PRISM snooping operation: the NSA and FBI are monitoring Microsoft, Google, YouTube, Yahoo, Facebook, Skype, Apple, and others.

Those companies have largely denied the reports, saying they never allowed the government direct access to their servers. Government officials have admitted the program exists, however, and President Obama himself defended it as legal in a Friday morning press conference.

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President Obama wants America to know that the PRISM scandal, which revealed the NSA and FBI have unfettered access to the data centers of companies like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo, actually only targets foreigners.

Needless to say, Europe is not happy.

News of PRISM, a program previously unknown to the public, broke Thursday evening in reports from the Guardian and the Washington Post.

Obama gave a prompt, awkward press conference Friday morning to address PRISM. Unknown to the public until this week, PRISM has almost unbelievable access to nine major tech companies' data, and uses that access to track emails, chats, and file transfers, according to a leaked NSA slideshow.

The President promised that "This does not apply to U.S. citizens and it does not apply to people living in the United States."

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Despite an extensive 2009 report that concluded that attempts to simply block access to such websites would be "crude, expensive and counterproductive," British home secretary Theresa May is calling for stricter policing of idealogue websites, a lower government tolerance for extremist groups, and greater pressure on academic institutions to reject applicants who practice hate speech.

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Protesting Turkish Airlines attendants would like to direct your attention to the front of the plane.

In a YouTube clip from Turkey, a group of protesters, each wearing Guy Fawkes masks, give a coordinated demonstration—not for safety, but for their rights as workers.

The video appears to feature striking Turkish Airlines employees, who have made their struggle part of the enormous anti-government protests that have engulfed Turkey. According to one copy of the video, the protesters stand in front of Turkish Airlines headquarters.

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Is anyone surprised?

Dumpster is good for saving files you accidentally delete off your Android phone—as a backup service. About a month ago, the app’s CEO Alik Hochner found that Dumpster was storing “deleted” Snapchat videos too. Hocher told Digital Trends that Snapchat was saving temporary videos on the Android SD card, and that Dumpster isn’t able to also retrieve photos because they're saved on the phone’s internal storage.

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The Soviet Union may be a thing of the past, but its domain isn’t. Think of it as a clubhouse for the new Russian kleptocracy.

.SU, assigned to the then-Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) in 1990, a year before its dissolution, is now a refuge for criminal hackers, according to the AP’s Raphael Satter.

The domain has “turned into a haven for hackers who've flocked to the defunct superpower's domain space to send spam and steal money.”

The migration to .SU began in 2011, when the officials overseeing Russia’s .RU domain tightened their rules.

Group-IB, a Russian Internet watchdog agency has found the number of malicious websites hosted on .SU doubled that year, then again in 2012, “surpassing even the vast number of renegade sites on .ru and its newer Cyrillic-language counterpart.” Perhaps the most well-known site is Exposed.su, which allegedly published credit records belonging to Michelle Obama, Mitt Romney, Donald Trump, Beyonce and others.

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PayPal, eBay’s popular online payment service, has a robust relationship with developers. It has a dedicated developer site and personnel, with APIs and SDKs available, and for several years has sponsored an event called CharityHack in London.

Now, it’s globalizing that relationship by launching Battle Hack.

Battle Hack is a “world series of hackathons,” to be held in 10 cities over the next six months. It starts in June in Berlin and ends with a championship in Silicon Valley in November.

“Every city will battle it out to select their local champion who we will fly to the world finals for one last hack-off,” according to the Battle Hack website.

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Other sites have to wait for their fame, languish for months or even years with barely a handful of Facebook fans, a once-in-awhile tweet or blog post linking to their site—but if they’re lucky they’ll keep gaining momentum, like a snowball rolling downhill until eventually you realize “That’s not a snowball; that’s an avalanche.”

With this in mind, here’s a cool movie-spoiler website, DoesTheDogDie.com, which rates movies solely by that standard—“the most important movie question” according to its subheading.

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The pseudonymous hacker “Guccifer,” whose list of hacking victims includes President George W. Bush and former secretaries of state Hillary Clinton and Colin Powell, has recently seemed to veer into surprising territory, hitting Sex and the City creator Candace Bushnell and journalist Carl Bernstein.

But now, tanned, rested and ready, he has returned to his old stomping grounds, the email accounts of political figures.

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The unabashedly pro-government SEA announced Thursday evening that the Syrian Computer Society (SCS), which regulates Syria's domain names and possibly shuts off the country's connectivity entirely in times of duress, had severed ties with the hacker group.

"SCS stopped our website hosting on its servers," one member of the SEA told the Daily Dot.

The Syrian government, currently embroiled in a civil war with rebels, has long maintained an unclear alliance with the SEA. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad once headed the SCS, who provided some of the SEA's early members, and Assad previously had referred to the SEA as "a real army in a virtual reality.” But, save the those references and fact that the country had granted the hackers a .sy domain name—a top-level domain exclusively issued by the SCS— there wasn't an explicit connection between the SEA and Assad's regime.

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