It has been revealed today, thanks to Edward Snowden, that Google and other US tech companies received millions of dollars from the NSA for their compliance with the PRISM mass surveillance system.
So just how close is Google to the US securitocracy? Back in 2011 I had a meeting with Eric Schmidt, the then Chairman of Google, who came out to see me with three other people while I was under house arrest. You might suppose that coming to see me was gesture that he and the other big boys at Google were secretly on our side: that they support what we at WikiLeaks are struggling for: justice, government transparency, and privacy for individuals. But that would be a false supposition.
Read moreThe federal government is making progress on developing a surveillance system that would pair computers with video cameras to scan crowds and automatically identify people by their faces, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with researchers working on the project.
The Department of Homeland Security tested a crowd-scanning project called the Biometric Optical Surveillance System — or BOSS — last fall after two years of government-financed development. Although the system is not ready for use, researchers say they are making significant advances. That alarms privacy advocates, who say that now is the time for the government to establish oversight rules and limits on how it will someday be used.
Read moreGuardian editors on Tuesday revealed why and how the newspaper destroyed computer hard drives containing copies of some of the secret files leaked by Edward Snowden. The decision was taken after a threat of legal action by the government that could have stopped reporting on the extent of American and British government surveillance revealed by the documents.
It resulted in one of the stranger episodes in the history of digital-age journalism. On Saturday 20 July, in a deserted basement of the Guardian's King's Cross offices, a senior editor and a Guardian computer expert used angle grinders and other tools to pulverise the hard drives and memory chips on which the encrypted files had been stored.
Read moreWe are now in, roughly, week 11 of what has become a more or less steady stream of revelations about the NSA's efforts to collect and analyze huge amounts of the data people create every day online.
Given what is now known, are the disclosures of the NSA's programs reshaping how people use the Internet? If so, this is a phenomenon that could in turn reshape, in a very basic way, what the Internet is -- what information it holds. A new report from the analytics firm Annalect finds what it calls "substantial" changes in Americans' behavior and attitudes since June.
Read moreThe former head of the National Security Agency said Sunday that not only does ending the NSA’s domestic surveillance programs seems unlikely, but he images those endeavors could expand in scope during the coming years.
Former NSA chief Michael Hayden told television host Bob Schieffer of CBS’ Face the Nation over the weekend that the current program that collects the metadata of millions of American phone customers on a regular basis for the United States government could in the future perhaps be used to soak up even more statistics about US citizens.
Read moreCountries of greatest interest to the U.S. are China, Russia, Pakistan, Iran, North Korea and Afghanistan, according to German weekly.
The United States’ surveillance programs included intensive spying on Germany, the German weekly Der Spiegel reported on Saturday. Der Spiegel cited a classified document from the archive of Edward Snowden, the American citizen who fled the U.S. after revealing details of its espionage programs and has received temporary asylum in Russia. According to the report, in April 2013, U.S. officials ranked its espionage targets on a scale of 1 (of highest interest) to 5.
Read moreCommunications sent between Germany’s two leading email providers will now be encrypted to provide better security against potential NSA surveillance. Experts say the move will do little to thwart well-equipped snoopers.
The "E-mail made in Germany" project has been set up in the wake of US surveillance revelations made by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. National Security Agency documents show that the agency intercepts 500 million phone calls, texts, and emails in Germany each month. "Germans are deeply unsettled by the latest reports on the potential interception of communication data," said Rene Obermann, head of Deutsche Telekom, the country’s largest email provider.
Read moreThe email service reportedly used by surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden abruptly shut down on Thursday after its owner cryptically announced his refusal to become "complicit in crimes against the American people."
Lavabit, an email service that boasted of its security features and claimed 350,000 customers, is no more, apparently after rejecting a court order for cooperation with the US government to participate in surveillance on its customers. It is the first such company known to have shuttered rather than comply with government surveillance. Silent Circle, another provider of secure online service.
Read moreThe National Security Agency, hit by disclosures of classified data by former contractor Edward Snowden, said Thursday it intends to eliminate about 90 percent of its system administrators to reduce the number of people with access to secret information.
Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, the U.S. spy agency charged with monitoring foreign electronic communications, told a cybersecurity conference in New York City that automating much of the work would improve security. "What we're in the process of doing - not fast enough - is reducing our system administrators by about 90 percent," he said.
Read moreLast night’s appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno went about as well as normal for Barack Obama, apparently.
Leno brought up some uncomfortable topics, taking the President off of his economic campaign speech, and into unchartered waters — literally, as Joe Biden would say. When pressed about the NSA’s widespread collection of domestic telephone and Internet records, Obama insisted that the NSA wasn’t spying on Americans … just keeping their records handy, or something: President Obama on Tuesday defended the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance programs in a wide-ranging interview on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
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