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All of the evidence found in this timeline can also be found in the Summary of Evidence we submitted to the court in Jewel v. National Security Agency (NSA). It is intended to recall all the credible accounts and information of the NSA's domestic spying program found in the media, congressional testimony, books, and court actions. The timeline also includes documents leaked by the Guardian in June 2013 that confirmed the domestic spying by the NSA. The documents range from a Top Secret Court Order by the secret court overseeing the spying, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court), to a working draft of an NSA Inspector General report detailing the history of the program. The "NSA Inspectors General Reports" tab consists of one of three documents: a July 10, 2009 report written by Inspectors General of the Department of Justice (DOJ), NSA, Department of Defense (DOD), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence; an internal working draft NSA Inspector General report leaked by the Guardian on June 27, 2013; and, an "End to End Review" of the Section 215 program conducted by the NSA for the FISA Court. For a short description of the people involved in the spying you can look at our Profiles page, which includes many of the key characters from the NSA Domestic Spying program.

Timeline of Edward Snowden's revelations Al Jazeera's in-depth look back at five months of NSA leaks by the former government contractor who fled from Hawaii to Hong Kong to Russia after releasing loads of documents on surveillance in the U.S. and around the world. Information below is compiled from outlets that first reported the data.

On March 16, Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe hours before McCabe's retirement, allegedly for showing a lack of candor under oath. A week later, McCabe penned a response in the Washington Post, calling the accusation “not true.” He stated that he “did not knowingly mislead or lie to investigators,” and that, at worst, he “was not clear in [his] responses.” On Friday, April 13, the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released a report on the allegations related to McCabe, concluding that he “lacked candor, including under oath, on multiple occasions in connection with describing his role in connection with a disclosure to the [Wall Street Journal]” in violation of FBI policy, and that his “disclosure of the existence of an ongoing investigation in the manner described in this report violated the FBI’s and the Department’s media policy and constituted misconduct.” The report makes no comment on whether McCabe's dismissal was justified. McCabe’s lawyer, Michael Bromwich, quickly responded with a statement refuting the claims in the OIG report.

McCabe’s lawyer, former Justice Department Inspector General Michael Bromwich, responded to the OIG report in a statement released on Friday. Bromwich expresses concerns about the speed at which the process of McCabe’s dismissal proceeded, describing the “rush to termination” as “nothing short of extraordinary.” He disputes the lack of candor findings, which he also discusses in more depth in a separate statement described below.

The report on McCabe is only part of a larger investigation by the OIG. Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz is reportedly planning to release a broader report on the FBI’s actions during the 2016 election in the coming weeks.

The National Security Agency has been forced to respond to unprecedented disclosures about its surveillance programs. Those programs have been assailed as a violation of privacy rights by critics and defended as critical to U.S. national security by intelligence officials. Explore the revelations and the fallout.

The US government has told the United Nations it will not monitor the UN's secret communications, following tough questions by the US congressional committee about the role of the National Security Agency in snooping on its allies. It follows allegations that the NSA had been bugging the German and French leaders, as VoR’s Tom Spender reports. 0It emerged on Wednesday that UN spokesman Martin Nesirky said the United Nations contacted the United States about the reports. "I understand that the US authorities have given assurances that United Nations communications are not and will not be monitored," Nesirky told reporters.

A federal lawsuit has been filed earlier this week accusing the world’s biggest social networking site, Facebook, of examining its users’ private messages contents "for purposes unrelated to the facilitation of message transmission". 0Two plaintiffs are seeking a class action suit on behalf of all Facebook users who have sent or received a private message in the past two years that contained links.

The European Parliament today voted to investigate the extent of the CIA’s detention, torture and rendition programme in EU countries. The decision comes two months after the US Senate intelligence committee published a redacted summary of its six year investigation into the CIA’s detention and interrogation programme. The European Parliament’s committees on civil liberties, foreign affairs and human rights previously investigated the CIA’s programme in 2006, and they will now resume their inquiry with new details from the Senate’s report. Passing today’s resolution, MEPs said the summary “reveals new facts that reinforce allegations that a number of EU member states… were complicit in the CIA’s secret detention and extraordinary rendition programme, sometimes through corrupt means based on substantial amounts of money provided by the CIA in exchange for their cooperation”. Romania, Poland and Lithuania are widely known to have hosted CIA black sites, along with those in Afghanistan, Thailand and Guantánamo Bay.

In the first case of its kind last July, the European Court of Human Rights considered whether Poland had been complicit in the detention and transport of two CIA detainees, Abu Zubaydah andAbd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

The motion passed today also encouraged the release of the report in full, without “excessive and unnecessary” redactions. References to individual countries were redacted in the summary on grounds of national security. Today’s resolution was approved by 363 votes to 290, with 48 abstentions.

U.S. Senator John McCain, Chairman of the Senate’s Armed Services Committee, called on Turkey to stop attacking Syrian Kurds. The committee is set to review the participation of US forces in the battle for Raqqa, Syria, without invitation from the Syrian government or authorization by a UN Security Council resolution. Ironically, in April 2013, McCain illegally snuck into Syria to hold a meeting with US-backed “rebels” including ISIS-chief al-Baghdadi.

Speaking to the press on Thursday US Senator John McCain (R-AZ), Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called on Turkey to stop its attacks on Syrian Kurds. More specifically, the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces, dominated by the US-backed Syrian Kurdish PYG and its military wings the YPG and the all female YPJ. The committee will review the participation of US forces in the battle for Raqqa. Turkey considers the PYG as a terrorist organization allied to the (Russian and in part Iranian-backed) PKK. Turkish military forces have repeatedly clashed with YPG / YPJ forces after Turkey, in October 17, invaded the region around Manbij, allegedly to fight the Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL, Daesh). Local sources, however, reported to nsnbc that ISIS has largely withdrawn from the region a week in advance of Turkey’s invasion, and that Turkish military forces, backed by the so-called Free Syrian Army, intermingled with Jabhat fatah al-Sham (a.k.a. al-Nusrah)were primarily engaging Kurdish forces.

Speaking to the press about his position and the Committee’s deliberations about the participation of US forces in operations in Raqqa, McCain said: “The United States has a longstanding relationship with Turkey, but a series of recent events have raised concerns about the fundamentals of our relations. … I have long argued that the Obama administration’s feckless approach to Syria has contributed to a strategic disaster on Turkey’s doorstep. … The Turkish government’s continued attacks on Syrian Kurds are destabilizing and troubling. … These Kurdish fighters have shown themselves to be willing and capable partners in the fight against the Islamic State in Syria, and our continued cooperation serves the national security interests of both the United States and other countries in the region, including Turkey … I urge the Turkish government to refrain from further attacks against Kurdish groups in Syria. …

China’s policy makers are coming up with new tactics almost every day to stem a rout that’s wiped $3.2 trillion off the world’s second-biggest stock market. Saturday June 27: *PBOC CUT: After the Shanghai Composite Index posted a 19 percent, two-week plunge, the central bank cut its benchmark lending rate and deposit rate, while also reducing required reserve ratios for some lenders Monday June 29: Shanghai Composite rises 2.3 percent at the open before reversing course and plunging as much as 7.6 percent. Closes 3.3 percent lower. * CSRC JAWBONING: China’s securities regulator says margin trading at brokerages is “controllable” and deposits in margin accounts are“nowhere near” dangerous levels. China Securities Regulatory Commission spokesman also urges investors to be rational and not to believe “shorting China rumors”

About Transparency Toolkit We need information about governments, companies, and other institutions to uncover corruption, human rights abuses, and civil liberties violations. Unfortunately, the information provided by most transparency initiatives today is difficult to understand and incomplete. Transparency Toolkit is an open source web application where journalists, activists, or anyone can chain together tools to rapidly collect, combine, visualize, and analyze documents and data. For example, Transparency Toolkit can be used to get data on all of a legislator’s actions in congress (votes, bills sponsored, etc.), get data on the fundraising parties a legislator attends, combine that data, and show it on a timeline to find correlations between actions in congress and parties attended. It could also be used to extract all locations from a document and plot them on a map where each point is linked to where the location was mentioned in the document.

Analysis Platform On the analysis platform, users can add steps to the analysis process. These steps chain together the tools, so someone could scrape data, upload a document, crossreference that with the scraped data, and then visualize the result all in less than a minute with little technical knowledge. Some of the tools allow users to specify input, but when this is not the case the output of the last step is the input of the next. Tools Existing and planned Transparency Toolkit tools include include scrapers and APIs for accessing data, format converters, extraction tools (for dates, names, locations, numbers), tools for crossreferencing and merging data, visualizations (maps, timelines, network graphs, maps), and pattern and trend detecting tools. These tools are designed to work in many cases rather than a single specific situation. The tools can be linked together on Transparency Toolkit, but they are also available individually. Where possible, we build our tools off of existing open source software. Road Map You can see the plans for future development of Transparency Toolkit here.

PA President Mahmoud Abbas signed the application for Palestine’s accession to the Rome Statute and the International Criminal Court (ICC). Abbas signed the application on Wednesday, in response to the UN Security Council’s rejection of a Jordanian sponsored draft resolution on Tuesday. The resolution called for a fixed timeline for the end of the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

The rejected resolution called for a 12-months timeline for a final peace accord between Israel and Palestine and the full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Palestinian territories by the end of 2017.

The rejected draft resolution was harshly criticized by imprisoned Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti, other progressive Fatah members as well as by the PFLP and others. One of the major points of contention was that the proposed draft resolution, according to its Palestinian opponents, risked waving the right of return of displaced Palestinians.

Tonight Russia and the U.S. agreed to some new Cessation of Hostilities (CoH) in Syria. The general negative points: This CoH, like the first one in February, comes at a moment where the Syrian government forces have an advantage in the field and are on the verge of renewed offensives. It gives the opposition the time to reorganize and rearm. It severely restricts Syrian sovereignty. The general positive points: The Syrian government lacks the capacity for a fully military solution of the conflict. The agreement is a possible path to a political solution. It gives the government time to rebuild its army and to issue and train on new equipment. It has enough flexibility to allow for local escalation when and where needed. On the agreement itself. The Syrian government has, according to the Russians, agreed to it. The parties agreed to keep many details secret to prevent other actors from spoiling it. The agreement will start on sundown of September 12

The timeline, as far as announced or known: A general CoH for with a trial period of 48 hours. If the CoH holds during the trial period it will be prolonged to one week. After one week successfully passed, the U.S. and Russia will start common action against al-Qaeda in Syria. Some Details as AP describes them (there is some doubt that this is 100% correct): The military deal would go into effect after both sides abide by the truce for a week and allow unimpeded humanitarian deliveries. Then, the U.S. and Russia would begin intelligence sharing and targeting coordination, while Assad's air and ground forces would no longer be permitted to target Nusra any longer; they would be restricted to operations against the Islamic State. The arrangement would ultimately aim to step up and concentrate the firepower of two of the world's most powerful militaries against Islamic State and Nusra, listed by the United Nations as terrorist groups.

The agreement excludes the area in south-west Aleppo where the recent attempt by al-Nusra and others to lift the siege on east-Aleppo failed. The Castello road in north-west Aleppo will be demilitarized to carry aid. (It is yet unknown who will supervise and enforce this by what means.) It looks as if there has been unseemly resistance to this agreement by parts of the U.S. government. This may have been just for show. But it may also be a sign that Obama lost control of the bureaucracy: The proposed level of U.S.-Russian interaction has upset several leading national security officials in Washington, including Defense Secretary Ash Carter and National Intelligence Director James Clapper, and Kerry only appeared at the news conference after several hours of internal U.S. discussions. After the Geneva announcement, Pentagon secretary Peter Cook offered a guarded endorsement of the arrangement and cautioned, "We will be watching closely the implementation of this understanding in the days ahead."

Current and former FBI officials have launched a media counter-offensive to engage head to head with the Clinton media machine and to throw off the shackles the Loretta Lynch Justice Department has used to stymie their multiple investigations into the Clinton pay-to-play network. Over the past weekend, former FBI Assistant Director and current CNN Senior Law Enforcement Analyst Tom Fuentes told viewers that “the FBI has an intensive investigation ongoing into the Clinton Foundation.” He said he had received this information from “senior officials” at the FBI, “several of them, in and out of the Bureau.” (See video clip from CNN below.) That information was further supported by an in-depth article last evening in the Wall Street Journal by Devlin Barrett. According to Barrett, the “probe of the foundation began more than a year ago to determine whether financial crimes or influence peddling occurred related to the charity.” Barrett’s article suggests that the Justice Department, which oversees the FBI, has attempted to circumvent the investigation. The new revelations lead to the appearance of wrongdoing on the part of U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch for secretly meeting with Bill Clinton on her plane on the tarmac of Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport on the evening of June 28 of this year. Not only was Bill Clinton’s wife under an FBI investigation at the time over her use of a private email server in the basement of her New York home over which Top Secret material was transmitted while she was Secretary of State but his own charitable foundation was also under investigation, a fact that was unknown at the time to the public and the media.

The reports leaking out of the FBI over the weekend came on the heels of FBI Director James Comey sending a letter to members of Congress on Friday acknowledging that the investigation into the Hillary Clinton email server was not closed as he had previously testified to Congress, but had been reopened as a result of “pertinent” emails turning up. According to multiple media sources, those emails were found on the laptop of Anthony Weiner, estranged husband of Hillary Clinton’s longtime aide, Huma Abedin. Weiner was forced to resign from Congress in 2011 over a sexting scandal with more sexting scandals to follow. Early this month, on October 3, the FBI raided Weiner’s apartment in New York with a search warrant in hand and seized multiple electronic devices. At least one of those devices had been used by both Weiner and Abedin to send email messages. The search warrant had been obtained following a detailed report that had appeared in the Daily Mail newspaper in the U.K. in September, showing sordid, sexual emails that Weiner had allegedly sent to a 15-year old girl in North Carolina. According to the content of the published emails, Weiner was aware that the girl was underage. While examining the hard drive of a laptop seized from Weiner, the FBI found metadata showing that thousands of the emails were exchanged between the private server located in Hillary Clinton’s basement in Chappaqua, New York. Since the FBI had only a search warrant to examine emails and documents related to the Weiner matter, it was not able to read the other emails but simply tallied up the metadata linked to the private server in Chappaqua to show how many potentially new emails might be in the trove on the laptop. (It is also possible that the FBI agents could have used a program to compare subject headings against those emails previously turned over by Abedin to make their case that Abedin had perjured herself when she testified to them that she had turned over all of her work-related emails from her time as Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations when Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State.)

The FBI officials briefed FBI Director James Comey last Thursday on the new trove of emails and he went public with his letter to Congress the next day – leading the Clinton camp to immediately launch a media assault on his motives. As if all of this wasn’t enough for the public to digest over the weekend, yesterday morning James Kallstrom, the former Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s New York Division and 25-year veteran of the FBI, went on the John Catsimatidis radio program to call the Clintons a “crime family.” (You can hear the full program here.) Kallstrom’s comments were further amplified when the New York Daily News reported on his criticisms that the FBI had been hamstrung from conducting a real investigation. The Daily News quoted Kallstrom from the radio program as follows: “ ‘This investigation was never a real investigation, they never had grand jury empaneled…This investigation was without the ability to serve subpoenas, serve search warrants, and obtain evidence … It was just ludicrous.’ ” On Wednesday of last week, just two days before FBI Director Comey issued his public letter to Congress, WikiLeaks released a devastating memo from Douglas Band, at the time a key figure at the Clinton Foundation and President of his own corporate consulting firm, Teneo. The memo was rife with suggestions of pay-to-play and personal enrichment schemes at the Clinton Foundation. The same day, Washington Post reporters Rosalind Helderman and Tom Hamburger reported the story, including the following details: