Despite saying that he “respects” Telegram’s founder, Russian Pavel Durov, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said the messenger lacks security at its default settings. “I respect @durov, but Ptacek is right: @telegram's defaults are dangerous. Without a major update, it's unsafe,” former CIA employee tweeted.

Snowden was referring to a specialist in cryptographic and embedded software security, who tweeted that Telegram’s plaintext is stored on the server. Pointing towards the vulnerability of such a setup, Snowden hinted that the plaintext of the messages should not be accessible to a service provider at all for a connection to be truly secure.

Government-secret leaker Edward Snowden should be granted protection because his leaks were in defense of human rights, the European Parliament said.

The parliament passed a nonbinding resolution that called on European Union member states to protect Snowden from "extradition or rendition by third parties" because of "his status as whistle-blower and international human rights defender." The resolution also asks EU countries to drop any criminal charges against Snowden. The former contractor for the US National Security Agency sparked global debate about surveillance in the digital age when he leaked secret NSA documents to journalists in 2013.

Smartphone users can do "very little" to stop security services getting "total control" over their devices, Edward Snowden has said. The former intelligence contractor told that UK intelligence agency GCHQ had the power to hack into phones without their owners' knowledge.

 GCHQ could gain access to a handset by sending it an encrypted text message and use it for such things as taking pictures and listening in. Mr Snowden did not suggest that either GCHQ or the NSA were interested in mass-monitoring of citizens' private communications but said both agencies had invested heavily in technology allowing them to hack smartphones.

Edward Snowden has called for a global push to protect people’s rights to digital privacy, arguing that now the bare facts of mass data surveillance are known it is time to “assert our traditional and digital rights so that we can protect them”.

The former National Security Agency contractor and whistleblower said efforts to protect privacy “will continue for many years”, culminating, he hoped, in a world in which governments could be relied upon to defend their citizens’ rights rather than “working against them”. Snowden’s call for new international laws to protect data privacy was made at the launch in New York of the so-called “Snowden Treaty”.

The White House has rejected a petition to pardon NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, dubbing the former contractor’s revelations about the US government’s surveillance apparatus as “dangerous” and compromising to national security.

Responding to a “We the People” petition, launched after Snowden’s initial leaks were published two years ago, the Obama administration reiterated its belief that he should face criminal charges for his actions. The US government filed espionage charges against Snowden shortly after his revelations were made public. He has been living under asylum in Moscow, after fleeing the US for Hong Kong in the wake of the leaks.

Former Attorney General Eric Holder said that a possibility exists for the Justice Department to cut a deal with former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that would allow him to return to the United States from Moscow.

In an interview, Holder said we are in a different place as a result of the Snowden disclosures and that his actions spurred a necessary debate that prompted President Obama and Congress to change policies on the bulk collection of phone records of American citizens. Holder’s comments came as he began a new job as a private lawyer at Covington & Burling, where he worked before serving as the nation’s top law enforcement officer from February 2009 until last April.

The Sunday Times produced what at first sight looked like a startling news story: Russia and China had gained access to the cache of top-secret documents leaked by former NSA contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Not only that, but as a result, Britain’s overseas intelligence agency, the Secret Intelligence Service, better known as MI6, had been forced “to pull agents out of live operations in hostile countries”. These are serious allegations and, as such, the government has an obligation to respond openly. The story is based on sources including “senior officials in Downing Street, the Home Office and the security services”.

British 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. 

US 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.

Documents 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.