The US National Security Agency tapped phone calls involving German chancellor Angela Merkel and her closest advisers for years and spied on the staff of her predecessors.
A report released by the group suggested NSA spying on Merkel and her staff had gone on far longer and more widely than previously realised. WikiLeaks said the NSA targeted 125 phone numbers of top German officials for long-term surveillance. The release risks renewing tensions between Germany and the US a month after they sought to put a row over spying behind them, with Barack Obama declaring in Bavaria that the two nations were inseparable allies.
Read moreThe Wikileaks website says it has evidence that a number of senior Brazilian government officials were routinely spied on by the National Security Agency in the United States. It says the NSA was particularly active in economic espionage against Brazil.
Wikileaks published a list of 29 phone numbers of Brazilians in banking, finance and the economy. According to the website the espionage apparently began in early 2011 or even earlier. President Dilma Rousseff cancelled a state visit to Washington two years ago when former CIA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that her phones and emails were being spied on.
Read moreThe US National Security Agency's infamous XKeyscore mass surveillance tool, first brought to light by whistleblower Edward Snowden, makes tracking people as easy as Googling their name, according to newly published documents.
The top-secret documents relating to XKeyscore detail how around 150 field sites in the US and abroad sweep up people's internet searches, emails, documents, usernames and passwords, and other private communications. In order to access all of a target's web activity and communications, all that is needed is the person's email address, telephone number, or other identifying data.
Read moreThe Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled that the National Security Agency may temporarily resume its once-secret program that systematically collects records of Americans’ domestic phone calls in bulk.
But the American Civil Liberties Union said that it would ask the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which had ruled that the surveillance program was illegal, to issue an injunction to halt the program, setting up a potential conflict between the two courts. Congress revived that provision on June 2 with a bill called the USA Freedom Act, which said the provision could not be used for bulk collection after six months.
Read moreWashington has been leading a policy of economic espionage against France for more than a decade by intercepting communications of the Finance minister and all corporate contracts valued at more than $200 million.
The revelations come in line with the ongoing publications of top secret documents from the US surveillance operations against France. The publications consist of seven top secret documents which detail the American National Security Agency’s economic espionage operations against Paris. NSA has been tasked with obtaining intelligence on all aspects of the French economy, from government policy to infrastructural development.
Read moreThe US National Security Agency spied on French Presidents in 2006-12, Wikileaks says. The whistleblower website cites top secret intelligence reports and technical documents from the NSA.
A French official said spying between allies was unacceptable. The US would not confirm the veracity of the documents. In 2013 the NSA was accused of spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Wikileaks said it began publishing the files under the heading "Espionnage Elysee" - a reference to the French presidential palace. It said the secret files derive from directly targeted NSA surveillance of the communications of the three French presidents.
Read moreBritish and American intelligence agencies have spied on anti-virus companies and probed their software for weaknesses, as the snoops sought to enhance their offensive surveillance techniques.
This was predictable given previous revelations around the extensive hacking capabilities at GCHQ and the NSA, but for reasons not outlined in the leaks or by the agencies themselves, notable US and UK anti-virus providers were seemingly left untouched, despite being used across the world. Older versions of F-Secure also used the Kaspersky signature database, which contained lists of blacklisted malware.
Read moreShould tech companies be obliged to guarantee government access to encrypted data on smartphones and other digital devices, and is that even possible without compromising the security of law-abiding customers?
Recently, the head of the National Security Agency provided a rare hint of what some U.S. officials think might be a technical solution. Why not, suggested Adm. Michael S. Rogers, require technology companies to create a digital key that could open any smartphone or other locked device to obtain text messages or photos?
Read moreUS companies will likely lose more than $35 billion in foreign business as a result of the vast NSA-surveillance operations revealed by Edward Snowden. The entire American tech industry has performed worse than expected as a result of the Snowden leaks.
The massive financial hit is likely one key reason leading major American tech firms, like Apple and Google, to not only include strong encryption in their smartphones, tablets, and services, but to also publicly oppose the outlawing of strong encryption. To reverse the trend, the report’s authors recommend, the U.S. government must follow five key directions.
Read moreDocuments leaked by Edward Snowden show that the U.S. government has widened the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance of Americans' international Internet traffic in the hunt for hackers.
The classified documents came from Snowden, the former NSA contractor who lives as a fugitive in Russia. In mid-2012, Justice Department lawyers wrote two secret memos allowing the NSA to begin hunting on Internet cables, without a warrant and inside the United States, for data linked to computer intrusions originating abroad, according to the documents. It said the data included traffic that flows to suspicious Internet addresses or contains malware.
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