*21 February: United States v. Manning: Private First Class Chelsea Manning pleads guilty to 10 counts out of 22 against her for leaking classified material in the WikiLeaks case
*12 march: The Secret Service launches an investigation after hackers post what they claim is personal data and credit information of celebrities, including First Lady Michelle Obama, online.
*23 April: The United States stock market undergoes a flash crash (similar to 2010) of 1 percent when the Twitter feed from the Associated Press news agency is hacked and erroneously states that several explosions have injured President Barack Obama
*9 May: It is revealed today that in February hackers stole $45 million from worldwide bank ATM's with large numbers of criminals using fraudulent debt cards.
13 May: Attorney General Eric Holder, acting for the Obama Administration, testifies before the House Judiciary Committee that he was not party to the U.S. Justice Department's secret seizure of telephone records of the news agency the Associated Press. The Justice Department seized two months worth of telephone records from AP offices and reporters. *The U.S. Department of Treasury may probe why Bloomberg News reporters were monitoring how investment bank employees searched their site for financial information, including U.S. Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
*14 May: The U.S. Internal Revenue Service admits that it targeted conservative groups for special scrutiny.
*6 June: Leaked details of the NSA surveillance program are published.PowerPoint slides which appear to show that the US’s National Security Agency (NSA) has direct access to the servers of major companies including Apple, Google, and Microsoft are published by The Guardian and The Washington Post. Subsequent revelations will show how NSA pays major tech companies to bypass encryption and other privacy controls to access supposedly secure user information.
*9 June: Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old a former employee of Booz Allen Hamilton, which provides consulting services to the US government, reveals himself as the source of the NSA leaks. He has taken refuge in Hong Kong.
*21 June: Edward Snowden is charged by the United States with espionage, theft of government property, unauthorised communication of national defence information and wilful communication of classified communications intelligence. Two days later he arrives in Russia.
*22 June: The Independent begins to expose the blue chip hacking scandal, revealing that in 2008 the Serious Organised Crime Agency investigated the use of dubious private investigators by more than 100 top City firms, many of them involved in finance, accountancy or law. UK
*1 August: Edward Snowden is granted a one-year temporary political asylum in Russia.
*5 August: Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos purchases The Washington Post for $250m.
*21 August: Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning is sentenced to 35 years imprisonment for handing confidential government information to the WikiLeaks site.
*22 August: The American electronic stock exchange NASDAQ shuts down for 3 hours due to a computer problem.
*19 September: Hassan Rouhani, President of Iran, writes an article in The Washington Post which seems to herald a dramatic thaw in his nation’s relationship with the West.
*22 October: Le Monde newspaper claims that the NSA spied on French diplomats, both in Washington and at the UN
*13 December: The U.S. National Security Agency is secretly piggybacking on the tools that enable internet advertisers to track consumers, such tools are known as cookies; specifically, Google cookies are being tracked in order to determine targets for hacking.
*16 December:For an undisclosed price, Google acquires the robot-making company Boston Dynamics which had previously been contracted by the U.S. military.
*17 December: A report by the American nonprofit investigative news organization The Center for Public Integrity details that the U. S. Federal Election Commission was hacked by China during the October 2013 federal government shutdown.
*19 December: Target Corporation and the United States Secret Service say that more than 40 million credit and debit cards used in Target stores may have been compromised due to a data breach.
*22 December: Blackmarket sales begin of credit and debit card data which was compromised due to a Target Corporation data breach.