The bipartisan leaders of a powerful Senate committee questioned the truthfulness of the US intelligence community in a heated Wednesday morning hearing as officials conceded that their controversial bulk phone records collection of millions of Americans was not "the most important tool" – contradicting statements they previously gave to Congress.
Two senators said they now planned to introduce new legislation before the August recess that would significantly transform the transparency and oversight of the bulk surveillance program. The chairman of the committee has already advocated for ending the bulk phone records collection and plans his own legislative push to shut it down.
Read moreA top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its "widest-reaching" system for developing intelligence from the internet.The latest revelations will add to the intense public and congressional debate around the extent of NSA surveillance programs.
Read moreThe U.S. intelligence community plans to declassify additional information about surveillance programs of the National Security Agency, possibly as soon as Tuesday, CNN has learned.
A senior U.S. official tells CNN the information includes "white papers" on surveillance programs but also previously undisclosed information about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The official declined to be identified because the information has not been made public yet and because of the sensitive nature of the information. He would not offer further details in advance of the declassification process, which could extend into later this week.
Read moreGlenn Greenwald, the Guardian columnist who has broken a series of stories about the National Security Agency's surveillance powers, said Sunday that even low-level NSA analysts have the ability to search through private communications.
Greenwald's comments defended bombshell revelations from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden at the time, which have since come under scrutiny by intelligence analysts. Greenwald is set to testify before Congress on Wednesday, along with other NSA surveillance critics and analysts. Greenwald dared NSA officials to dispute the claims when testifying this week.
Read moreEdward Snowden was wanted after he had exposed the information about surveillance programs made by U.S. secretive agencies all over the world. His exposure opened the question about privacy. In U.S. where PRISM is used overall anonymity becomes a rarity. Someone accepted it, someone is angry, but everybody agrees that there is no easy way to avoid NSA curious eye.
“5 years ago, I would say that mobile phone is a small informer in your pocket and that you should get rid of it and should not carry. It doesn't matter now. There are automatic license plate readers which allow watching you.
Read moreDeutsche Telecom Company staff cooperates with American secret services for more than 10 years. According to Focus the representatives of the company provided information to FBI from 2000. There occurred a document in edition of Focus magazine that points the German company representatives cooperate with FBI very close from 2000.
This cooperation began when German company had bought American company Voice Stream Wireless (now known as T-Mobile). After purchasing American company Germans had to sign a special agreement with American secret services that requires the disclosure of information.
Read moreKatherine Losse claims social network's customer support could access any user's account with a master password. Facebook employees at one time had access to a “master password” that granted them access to every one of the accounts on the social network, according to a former employee.
And while “more secure forms of logging in to repair accounts” were later put into operation, Katherine Losse, who joined Facebook in 2005 as its 51st employee, told The Guardian Wednesday that members of the site should avoid sharing personal information, especially now that the scope of surveillance by the U.S. government has come to light.
Read moreAbout a year after Facebook reportedly joined PRISM, Max Kelly, the social network's chief security officer left for a job at the National Security Agency, either a curious career move or one that makes complete sense.
The Chief Security Officer at a tech company is primarily concerned with keeping its information inside the company. Now working for an agency that tries to gather as much information as it can, Kelly's new job is sort of a complete reversal. Facebook, among other tech companies, has distanced itself from the government, claiming it only cooperates when it is legally required to.
Read moreAccording to the documents, leaked by Edward Snowden to the Guardian, the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) collects vast amounts of data from fibre-optic systems. The scale of the operation is massive, and the use of the data, also shared with the NSA is a big concern.
The project called Tempora aims to attach probes on 90% of the cables running through the UK. In the last 5 heart Tempora is half way - it has access to 200 fibre-optic cables (including the transatlantic traffic), collecting and analysing data from 46 of them. This adds up to 600 million “communication events” daily when full content of transmissions is preserved for 3 days and metadata for 30.
Read moreThere's been plenty of commentary concerning the latest NSA leak concerning its FISA court-approved "rules" for when it can keep data, and when it needs to delete it. As many of you pointed out in the comments to that piece – and many others are now exploring – the rules seem to clearly say that if your data is encrypted, the NSA can keep it.
As part of this, the rules note: In the context of a cryptanalytic effort, maintenance of technical data bases requires retention of all communications that are enciphered or reasonably believed to contain secret meaning, and sufficient duration may consist of any period of time.
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