WikiLeaks has released documents it said had been collected from CIA director John Brennan’s personal AOL account, the first in what the group said would be a series of publications.

The personal email account of the US’s top spy was compromised by hackers who claimed to be high school students. Those hackers had threatened on Twitter to release the same documents. The embarrassing leaks include a questionnaire for the official’s security clearance marked: “Review copy – Do not retain.” Other documents included an early version of the Limitations on Interrogations Techniques Act of 2008, a bill defining the limits of interrogation methods.

To infiltrate foreign networks and gain access to sensitive systems, the NSA has been using the tactics of “physical subversion” – deploying undercover agents in Chinese, German, South Korean and possibly even American companies.

Past reports on the National Security Agency have typically depicted a government organ that hacks other systems or works with private corporations to bypass their own encryption protections, but the latest report based on files leaked by Edward Snowden suggests the agency could be embedding operatives into foreign, as well as domestic, “commercial entities.”

According to Edward Snowden, people who care about their privacy should stay away from popular consumer Internet services like Dropbox, Facebook, and Google. Snowden conducted a remote interview today as part of the New Yorker Festival, where he was asked a couple of variants on the question of what we can do to protect our privacy.

His first answer called for a reform of government policies. Some people take the position that they “don’t have anything to hide,” but he argued that when you say that, “You’re inverting the model of responsibility for how rights work”.

An elite team of US government hackers left Syria without internet, when they tried to hack one of the cores routers but instead crashed it, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said.

The three-day nationwide internet blackout in war-torn Syria in November 2012, which was blamed on either the government or the rebels, depending on who you listened to, was actually the doing of the Tailored Access Operations (TAO), a group of hackers in the employment of the US National Security Agency. And more more interesting.

At a recent debate concerning the National Security Agency’s bulk surveillance programs, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden admitted that metadata is used as the basis for killing people.

The comments were made during a debate at Johns Hopkins University, after Georgetown University Law Center professor David Cole detailed the kind of information the government can obtain simply by collecting metadata – who you call, when you call them, how long the call lasts, and how often calls between the two parties are made. Although NSA supporters often claim such metadata collection is permissible considering the content of the call is not collected.

The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden.

A senior manager for the program compares it to a time machine — one that can replay the voices from any call without requiring that a person be identified in advance for surveillance. On Jan. 17, President Obama called for significant changes to the way the NSA collects and uses telephone records of U.S. citizens.  

Representatives of Obama‘s Administration continue to insist that spying on Americans is not a violation of constitutional rights of citizens and carried out exclusively in the interests of national security.

However, Chris Kitts, the father of beforeitsnews.com, believes that the obtained information is used not only for security purposes.

According to Chris Kitts, Washington creates “The machine for the implementation blackmail. Now they have access to the emails of people who are in the data store in Utah.

Ostensibly concerned that terrorists would disguise themselves as gamers in order to secretly communicate, agents from the NSA, CIA, Pentagon and Britain's GCHQ have posed undercover in online realms like World of Warcraft, Second Life, and Xbox Live. In fact, the practice grew so popular with the spy agencies that a special "deconfliction" group was established to prevent the agents from inadvertently spying on or trying to recruit each other.

Our country's best and brightest began disguising themselves as digital trolls, elves, and supermodels in 2008, after a top-secret NSA documents—provided by Edward Snowden described the games as a "target-rich communication network" that lets terrorists and other criminals "hide in plain sight."

In a mission statement last year the US National Security Agency described how it would continue to expand its power and assert itself as the global leader in clandestine surveillance, according to a new report based on the Edward Snowden leaks.

The five-page document brought to light Friday by the New York Times reveals the intelligence agency’s intention to “aggressively pursue legal authorities and a policy framework mapped more fully to the information age. ” The spy agency sought the ability to trace “anyone, anywhere, anytime,” according to its 2012 mission statement. Dated February 2012, the memo was written after PRISM and many of the other programs.

A former senior British secret intelligence officer on Thursday played down any potential damage done by the leaks to the Guardian of the spying activities of GCHQ and America's National Security Agency, apparently contradicting claims made by UK security chiefs.

The leaks, by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden were "very embarrassing, uncomfortable, and unfortunate", Nigel Inkster, former deputy chief of MI6, said. While Inkster said it was too early to draw any definite conclusions about the impact of the leaks, he added: "I sense that those most interested in the activities of the NSA and GCHQ have not been told very much they didn't know already or could have inferred."