Surveillance again dominated the news this week. Members of Congress started speaking up about the National Security Agency’s spying programs, lawsuits piled up on the NSA's doormat and a couple of hackers turned a Verizon signal booster into a personal wiretapper.

1. On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee held a declassified hearing on the NSA. The committee grilled the four panelists, among them Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole, and took strong stances against the NSA's surveillance strategies. Many weighed in with harsh criticism of the spying programs: “It's clear to me that we have a very serious violation of the law,” said Rep. John Conyers.
2. Big Brother isn't the only one we have to worry about. A couple of well-intentioned hackers cracked a Verizon femtocell, or network extender, and sniffed the call content of all the Verizon customers in the area. Verizon has updated its network extenders to prevent the same issue from popping up in the future, but the fact that this kind of problem existed in the first place should be a wakeup call to cellphone users.
3. An independent team of coders in Australia is working on a creepy little game called Data Dealer, in which you play the role of an information broker in the digital age. This is part of a broader trend in gaming; games like Papers, Please and Cart Life use their mechanics to make the players think about the implications of the choices they make.
4. The NSA is awash in petitions and lawsuits responding to this summer's leaks. On Tuesday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the NSA, arguing that its surveillance dragnet violates the right to free assembly guaranteed under the First Amendment. A varied coalition of groups, including Free Press, joined EFF in the lawsuit.
5. Here's a feel-good story to top the week off. In an effort to cheer up her daughter undergoing chemotherapy, a mother taped the words "SEND PIZZA RM 4112" to the hospital window. Someone saw this, snapped a photo, posted it to reddit and the rest came naturally. Soon the Los Angeles hospital was receiving so much pizza that it had to start cancelling the orders. And little Hazel was ecstatic.

As a bonus, here are 10 websites from the year I learned my ABCs.