SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- Last Wednesday, The Washington Post obtained documents indicating that the National Security Agency (NSA) gathers nearly five billion records each day that track the locations of users around the world, including some Americans. The data was provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. His revelations continue to expose a domestic surveillance operation far more widespread than the public was initially led to believe. But the NSA wants you to know that these data-mining expeditions serve a greater, more benevolent good. So as a special holiday treat, the NSA, free of charge, will send Santa Claus the Christmas lists of every child whose records were intercepted by government systems through an automated process that "promotes immediacy, assured delivery and overcomes challenges with illegible letters, improper postage or incorrect addressing that often occur when silly liberal children are allowed to correspond with the North Pole directly."

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- Despite reassuring rhetoric from both sides of the political aisle in Congress, which has grown from a fissure to a continental divide, the government shutdown now entering its second week has halted more than so-called nonessential services. Intelligence officials have expressed concerns about national security with 70 percent of NSA employees furloughed. "The damage will be insidious," Director of National Intelligence James Clapper warned the Senate Judiciary Committee. "Each day that goes by, the jeopardy increases." The situation, however, appears to have taken a turn for the ironic with telecommunications and Internet service providers reporting dramatic increases in subscribers making phone calls, sending emails and posting on social networks.

Photo by Ken Murray 1992

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- Many Americans may not know Charles Varnadore, who died this March at the age of 71, but his actions in the early 1990s laid the groundwork for the U.S. government's aggressive initiative to suppress and destroy an increasingly irritating crop of whistleblowers who have made life difficult for corporations and politicians over recent years. Varnadore had formerly worked as a technician at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, a federal nuclear research facility that assisted in the development of the atomic bomb. After raising the alarm about serious but expensive-to-correct safety violations at the plant, he was relocated by his superiors to an office polluted with radioactive waste. His death was brought to national attention two days ago by The New York Times. On Tuesday, an NSA spokesperson issued a press statement expressing the tremendous relief of the agency and its leaders, even suggesting that this victory could result in the government reducing its reliance on warrantless domestic surveillance programs.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- As the international manhunt for Edward Snowden intensifies, President Obama again tried to defend his war on whistle-blowers and the need for warrantless surveillance programs. Attorney General Holder called such actions "vital to the preservation of national security." The president even rationalized spying on the governments of European allies this Monday as a standard practice in the international intelligence community. But the NSA's data collection and monitoring efforts are neither biased nor prejudiced by religious and ethnic profiling, the president assured; every American is suspect, because any individual could be working with a terrorist cell. As if to illustrate the point Wednesday, the president fretfully admitted being suspicious about his own connections to the leaders of terrorist nations after reviewing transcripts of his private phone calls and emails, which were obtained by the Department of Justice (DOJ) on his orders.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- The National Security Agency (NSA) and the Obama administration have spent the last 11 days wiping egg from their faces after a federal contractor, Edward Snowden, brought to light a series of covert data mining operations orchestrated by the U.S. government against everyday Americans, without their knowledge or consent. Because the NSA targeted telecommunications and Internet service providers, which contractually assure users that their private communications are protected under the service agreements, the outrage has been widespread. But despite the backlash over these intrusive and legally questionable violations, the NSA has made a conciliatory gesture by offering its vast repository of personal intelligence as a free cloud storage and emergency backup service, competing directly with companies such as Google and Dropbox.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- Edward Snowden, the former Booz Allen Hamilton contractor whose work with the National Security Agency (NSA) provided him access to extremely classified U.S. intelligence, shocked the world when he exposed sensitive details about the Obama administration's warrantless wiretapping of private communications between innumerable U.S. citizens with no ties to terrorism. On Wednesday, the self-confessed leaker went on to allege that the U.S. government has also been undertaking enormous hacking operations against targets in China since 2009, part of more than 61,000 similar initiatives worldwide. But Snowden's revelations didn't end there. He rocked the boat again early Thursday morning from his self-imposed exile in Hong Kong when he showed the South China Morning Post evidence that Facebook was conceived as a government data collection tool, and that Mark Zuckerberg doesn't really exist.