NSA

The Washington Post has another revelation on the basis of leaker Edward Snowden's materials: The National Security Agency is "gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world."

The Post further reports: "The NSA’s capabilities to track location are staggering, based on the Snowden documents, and indicate that the agency is able to render most efforts at communications security effectively futile."

Yahoo is softening CEO Marissa Mayer's remark this week that the reason the firm isn't doing more to push back against court orders that the tech firm can't reveal how much surveillance has been requested the government is because doing so would result in imprisonment on grounds of treason.

A Yahoo spokeswoman, according to the Wall Street Journal, explained: '"The point is that Yahoo fought in lower court and then again in appellate court, and we lost,' said spokeswoman Sara Gorman by email. 'At that point, failure to comply would be in contempt of valid legal process that had undergone two levels of federal court review, and could have led to incarceration.”'