The National Security Agency (NSA) will establish a Cybersecurity Directorate that redefines its cybersecurity mission, according to the NSA website. 

Within days of reports about the National Security Agency’s electronic surveillance efforts, it was revealed that French intelligence services operated a similar system with minimal oversight, The New York Times reports. Last week, with little public debate, the French legislature approved a law that critics fear would expand electronic surveillance of French residents and businesses. The provision was quietly passed as part of a routine military spending bill, and it defines the conditions under which intelligence agencies may gain access to or record telephone conversations, emails, Internet activity, personal location data and additional electronic communications, the article reports.

The NSA has been using its collections of data since November 2010 to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information, a New York Times article reports.

In a New York Times/CBS NewsPoll, a week after the Boston Marathon attack, which was unraveled after the release of video footage of the two suspects flushed them out of hiding, 78 percent of people said surveillance cameras were a good idea.

Edward Snowden, the former CIA employee who blew the lid off of the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance programs, has released the U.S. intelligence community’s classified “black budget” for fiscal year 2013.

Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) was recently designated as a Center of Excellence in Cybersecurity Research in a program jointly managed by the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security, according to a WPI press release.