The former head of the National Security Agency said Sunday that not only does ending the NSA’s domestic surveillance programs seems unlikely, but he images those endeavors could expand in scope during the coming years.
Former NSA chief Michael Hayden told television host Bob Schieffer of CBS’ Face the Nation over the weekend that the current program that collects the metadata of millions of American phone customers on a regular basis for the United States government could in the future perhaps be used to soak up even more statistics about US citizens.
Read moreCommunications sent between Germany’s two leading email providers will now be encrypted to provide better security against potential NSA surveillance. Experts say the move will do little to thwart well-equipped snoopers.
The "E-mail made in Germany" project has been set up in the wake of US surveillance revelations made by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. National Security Agency documents show that the agency intercepts 500 million phone calls, texts, and emails in Germany each month. "Germans are deeply unsettled by the latest reports on the potential interception of communication data," said Rene Obermann, head of Deutsche Telekom, the country’s largest email provider.
Read moreThe email service reportedly used by surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden abruptly shut down on Thursday after its owner cryptically announced his refusal to become "complicit in crimes against the American people."
Lavabit, an email service that boasted of its security features and claimed 350,000 customers, is no more, apparently after rejecting a court order for cooperation with the US government to participate in surveillance on its customers. It is the first such company known to have shuttered rather than comply with government surveillance. Silent Circle, another provider of secure online service.
Read moreThe National Security Agency, hit by disclosures of classified data by former contractor Edward Snowden, said Thursday it intends to eliminate about 90 percent of its system administrators to reduce the number of people with access to secret information.
Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, the U.S. spy agency charged with monitoring foreign electronic communications, told a cybersecurity conference in New York City that automating much of the work would improve security. "What we're in the process of doing - not fast enough - is reducing our system administrators by about 90 percent," he said.
Read moreMajor telecom companies have been assisting the UK intelligence agency GCHQ by granting access to all the traffic passing through their fiber-optic cables – and by developing Trojan software, leaked papers obtained by German media reveal.
The classified slides obtained by German news agencies Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) and NDR list global telecommunication operators among the collaborators of the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters. The documents are said to have been leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The 2009-dated GCHQ slides reportedly provide the names of the following companies.
Read moreThe US government has paid at least £100m to the UK spy agency GCHQ over the last three years to secure access to and influence over Britain's intelligence gathering programmes. The top secret payments are set out in documents which make clear that the Americans expect a return on the investment, and that GCHQ has to work hard to meet their demands.
"GCHQ must pull its weight and be seen to pull its weight," a GCHQ strategy briefing said. The funding underlines the closeness of the relationship between GCHQ and its US equivalent, the National Security Agency.
Read moreThe 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.
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