Short answers, pulled from the story.
The National Security Agency was officially established on the 4th of November 1952, when Secretary of Defense Robert A. Lovett signed a memo renaming the Armed Forces Security Agency as the NSA. President Harry S. Truman had signed a classified memorandum on the 24th of October 1952, calling for the agency's creation.
Beginning in June 2013, Edward Snowden disclosed that the NSA was intercepting and storing communications from over a billion people worldwide, including U.S. citizens, and tracking hundreds of millions of people through cell phone metadata. He also revealed programs including PRISM, Boundless Informant, and the FASCIA location database, which held more than 27 terabytes of device-location data collected over roughly seven months.
The NSA provided signals intelligence that indicated a North Vietnamese attack on a U.S. naval destroyer during the Gulf of Tonkin incident, contributing to the escalation of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Declassified documents later revealed that the NSA had misinterpreted or overstated its intelligence, and the reported second North Vietnamese attack likely never occurred.
NSA headquarters is located at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, approximately 20 miles southwest of Baltimore and 25 miles northeast of Washington, D.C. The main building contains more than 3,000,000 square feet of floor space and sits on 350 acres of the installation.
MINARET was a secret NSA program that monitored the phone communications of U.S. senators Frank Church and Howard Baker, civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King Jr., and prominent journalists and athletes who had criticized the Vietnam War. An internal NSA review concluded that the program was "disreputable if not outright illegal."
The NSA's Tailored Access Operations division intercepted routers, servers, and other network hardware in transit before delivery to targeted organizations and installed covert firmware on the devices. A device called Cottonmouth could also be inserted at a computer's USB port to establish remote access to the targeted machine.