Microsoft worked hand-in-hand with the United States government in order to allow federal investigators to bypass encryption mechanisms meant to protect the privacy of millions of users, Edward Snowden.

According to an article published on Thursday by the British newspaper, internal National Security Agency memos show that Microsoft actually helped the federal government find a way to decrypt messages sent over select platforms, including Outlook.com Web chat, Hotmail email service, and Skype. Snowden, the 30-year-old former systems administrator for NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, provided the paper with files detailing.

About 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.

According 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.

Agency surveillance programs, and disputing the notion that he is following in the footsteps of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. In a PBS interview with Charlie Rose, Obama said efforts to track terrorists through phone and Internet surveillance have safeguards to prevent abusing the civil liberties of innocent Americans.

Obama cited both congressional and judicial oversight. When Rose asked, "should this be transparent in some way?" Obama responded: "It is transparent. That's why we set up the FISA court."

According to Der Spiegel, Germany's intelligence agency has a 100-million-euro plan to expand Internet surveillance. Meanwhile, the interior minister wants travelers to fill out a questionnaire before entering the EU. Der Spiegel reported on Sunday that the Federal Intelligence Service plans to expand its Internet surveillance program to cover 20 percent of all communications between Germany and foreign countries.

Because of technical limitations, the intelligence agency - known by its German acronym, BND - currently only monitors 5 percent of all Internet and telephone communication. However, according to German law, the BND can snoop on a maximum 20 percent of all communications traffic.