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.

There'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.

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."

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has slammed a recently exposed NSA mass-surveillance scheme as a "calamitous collapse in the rule of law." Google, Facebook and other tech giants apparently involved have denied giving the NSA access to their servers.

Assange accused the US government of trying to "launder" its activities concerning the large-scale spying program PRISM. The system was made public after a leaked classified National Security Agency (NSA) document was revealed earlier this week. 

"The US administration has the phone records of everyone in the United States and is receiving them daily from carriers to the National Security Agency under secret agreements. That's what's come out," he said.

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.

The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind.

The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers.

Google was sentenced to disclose to the FBI users' data without a court warrant first. The decision on the case of Google, which tried to challenge the demands of the deadly Bureau, was issued by an American federal court. The hearing was held behind the closed doors.Google officials tried to challenge the FBI's demands.

The court considered 19 requests from the FBI which contradict the American constitution. However, the court decided Google must execute 17 demands and demands for additional information on two more users. The court left for Google to challenge individual queries if the company finds formal infringements. The lawsuit does not end there: Google intends to appeal the decision, and the FBI threatened to proceed against the company for failure to cooperate with investigations.

All who uses Skype, it is obliged will agree with point that the company can read everything that there write (look Privacy policy in Skype). Company Heis, together with German colleagues, has found out by the elementary experiment that Microsoft actively uses this possibility, but very much oddly.

Practically right after message sendings in Skype in which the link on certain https a resource contained, the given resource has been visited with IP, belonging Microsoft HQ in Redmond, the USA. It has been noticed that after transfer to a body of the message of the link, the traffic unusual to it distinguished by the server as potential attack of repeated reproduction is generated. In too time IP the address from which "malefactor" tries to get access under the link, belongs Microsoft.

The charge: Microsoft is reconfiguring the Skype network so that it Law Enforcement Agencies (LEA) can have access to intercept calls over the network to aid in investigations. The reality is of course convoluted with no concrete evidence but it’s worth mentioning what exactly is going on here. So head past the break to get the scoop. 

As Rafael Rivera explained a few months ago is his article about Skype and Windows Phone, Skype’s original network operated on a peer-to-peer node system which means that Skype only initiated the calls but the actual communication was one-to-one with no one as the middleman.