On Wednesday Russia granted NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden asylum for a year, while earlier this week a military court found WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning not guilty of aiding the enemy, though guilty of a slew of lesser charges.

Coincidentally, I also finally got around to watching the BBC’s enjoyable and entirely too short “Spies of Warsaw” miniseries, which is set just before World War II and involves a lot of good old-fashioned tradecraft: honey pots, briefcases with false bottoms, street-corner stakeouts, and sneaking around in the dark. The difference between that kind of legwork and what Manning and Snowden did makes me wonder if the clandestine servants of yesteryear are sitting around the old spies’ home, grumbling about how easy the kids today have it, the way they can move more intelligence than anyone could read in a year with the push of a button.

This week, four stories about paradigm-shifting technology, ready to read here on TMN or in an e-book you can export to your Kindle, iPad, iPhone, etc.