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The crowd has Edward Snowden's back, but will it be a big enough posse to keep him out of hot water with the federal government?

With revelations this past week that the National Security Agency has been surveying all sorts of electronic communications in a sort of involuntary crowdsourcing campaign, perhaps it's not surprising that the crowd is now coming to the aid of the whistleblower who revealed the NSA's classified surveillance program called PRISM.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper insists that PRISM, which allegedly gives the NSA some degree of access to data passing though Internet companies in the U.S., is lawful and authorized by Congress. He called the leak "reckless."… Read more

Update, June 8 at 2:45 p.m. PT: In response to outcry over PRISM, the U.S. director of national intelligence has released some details. Among other things, he says the government "does not unilaterally obtain information from the servers of U.S. electronic communication service providers" and that PRISM-related activities are conducted "under court supervision." More here.

The National Security Agency has not obtained direct access to the systems of Apple, Google, Facebook, and other major Internet companies, CNET has learned.

Recent reports in The Washington Post and The Guardian claimed a classified program … Read more

President Obama offered a lawyerly defense of the National Security Agency this morning that can be summarized in two words: Trust us.

"The people involved in America's national security they take this work very seriously," he said. "The last thing they'd be doing is taking programs like this to listen to people's phone calls."

The president, whose administration has been buffeted by a series of disclosures in the last two days about warrantless NSA surveillance, was supposed to be speaking to reporters in the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, Calif., about health care. … Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Weird Al Yankovic says next album will be his last.

- Australian scientists uncover "God's bathtub."

- These Blu-ray discs will last 1,000 years.

- You guys, Xanga is about to shut down unless we give them $60k.

- This teenager would rather go to jail than play his Xbox 360.… Read more

The White House is defending the decision to collect the telephone records of U.S. citizens by labeling it an anti-terrorist measure.

The move by the National Security Agency to gather the phone records of Verizon customers was revealed on Wednesday by U.K. newspaper The Guardian. A court's top-secret order forced Verizon to hand over information about domestic and overseas calls "on an ongoing daily basis."

The court order, which can be seen on The Guardian's Web site, forces Verizon to release all call details or "telephony metadata" created by the carrier for … Read more

LG unveiled on Tuesday a white version of its blockbuster Nexus 4, while an executive nixed plans for a sequel device.

An LG executive told Dutch Web site All About Phones that it has no plans to build the Nexus 5, citing Kim Wong, head of LG's Europe business. The report was translated by Android Beat.

An LG representative confirmed the executive comments, but noted that the company wouldn't rule out another Nexus in the future. The representative said that the executive intended to convey the belief at LG that it didn't need the Nexus name to … Read more

Black & White Master takes one of the most frustrating components of photo editing on the iPhone and makes it as intuitive and easy to do as possible, using swipe and touch gestures built into the app's interface. It is not the best photo editing app on the App Store, but certainly a very fun one to use.

Black & White Master performs exactly as it sounds, allowing you to turn your photos into black & white images (or take new ones in black & white). When you open the app, you will select or take an image, and … Read more

You thought it had been settled, didn't you?

You've been practicing the new pronunciation (or the old one).

And now you're going to have to think again.

Recently, the White House very presciently decided to open its own non-purple Tumblr account. It took the occasion to declare with seeming finality that GIFs -- those very files that so many people find funny -- are hard, not soft.

Hard as in hard "g." Gif like "gift." Not like "jiffy."

Some giffers fell in line. Now they will have second thoughts. For the … Read more

The U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI believe they don't need a search warrant to review Americans' e-mails, Facebook chats, Twitter direct messages, and other private files, internal documents reveal.

Government documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union and provided to CNET show a split over electronic privacy rights within the Obama administration, with Justice Department prosecutors and investigators privately insisting they're not legally required to obtain search warrants for e-mail. The IRS, on the other hand, publicly said last month that it would abandon a controversial policy that claimed it could get warrantless access … Read more