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National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden has found the court of public opinion to be far more receptive than a court of law. He conducts the occasional interview with seemingly sympathetic journalists. NBC News aired one such interview with anchorman Brian Williams on Wednesday night. "Do you see yourself as a patriot?" Williams asked. "I do," answered Snowden, now 30. He was just trying to protect the country and the Constitution "from the encroachment of adversaries -- and those adversaries don't have to be foreign countries." Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, was having none of it. "In...

Over the past 24 hours the website for TrueCrypt (a very widely used encryption solution) was updated with a rather unusually styled message stating that TrueCrypt is “considered harmful” and should not be used.

The abrupt announcement that the widely used, anonymously authored disk-encryption tool Truecrypt is insecure and will no longer be maintained shocked the crypto world--after all, this was the tool Edward Snowden himself lectured on at a Cryptoparty in Hawai'i. Cory Doctorow tries to make sense of it all.

Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday called National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden a fugitive and challenged him to "man up and come back to the United States." Kerry was asked about Snowden in a nationally broadcast interview in the wake of an interview in which Snowden said he never intended to be holed up in Russia but was forced to go there because Washington decided to "revoke my passport." Asked about this, Kerry replied on NBC's "Today" show: "Well, for a supposedly smart guy, that's a pretty dumb answer, after all."

Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who helped NSA leaker Edward Snowden expose state secrets to the world, is set to make his “biggest” disclosure yet — the names of Americans the government spied on, he told The Sunday Times.Greenwald added that Snowden’s legacy will be “shaped in large part” by this “finishing piece,” which is based on information obtained in the nearly 2 million documents the former NSA contractor secretly stole from the government.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is "considering' returning to the United States if certain conditions are met, his lawyer told Germany's Der Spiegel. "There are negotiations," Snowden's German lawyer Wolfgang Kaleck said, according to a translation on RT.com, a news agency based in Russia. "Those who know the case are aware that an amicable agreement with the U.S. authorities will be most reasonable," Kaleck said. Snowden is not involved in the negotations, Kaleck told Der Spiegel.

A few weeks back, I read a Washington Post story "Inside the admissions process at George Washington University" and noted this interesting tidbit towards the end: GW also asks students to list a role model and two words to describe themselves. As for herself, Freitag said, she would list “Martha Stewart/Tina Fey” and “sassy/classy.” This year, she’s seeing a lot of Edward Snowden citations. I had thought about writing it up, but decided it was a pretty small thing, really. It's not secret that, as a group, younger people have a much more favorable impression of Snowden than older people....

ON JULY 2 LAST YEAR, the governments of Portugal, France, Italy, and Spain bowed to US orders and refused airspace to the plane carrying Bolivian president Evo Morales. He’d been traveling from Russia to South America until his presidential jet was forced to land in Vienna. Morales and his ministers were stranded there for 15 hours. Acting on bad intelligence or mere suspicions, the higher-ups in the Obama administration, and perhaps President Obama himself, decreed this embarrassing, unprecedented, and illegal detention of a foreign sovereign. The lies fed to Morales and his pilots in Vienna — that there were “technical”...

Snowden has been holding court and putting America and its intelligence policies on trial. It should be the reverse: America should be holding court with Snowden on trial. I don’t agree with the blanket and universal snooping and data collection in which the NSA has been engaging. I think it’s dangerous for many reasons, the most disturbing of which is the temptation to use the data for political purposes. There should be no illusion here: any society that has the technical capability to offer universal, personal, and mobile access to the largest collection of human knowledge in history, has the...

U.S. military satellites spied Russian troops amassing within striking distance of Crimea last month. But intelligence analysts were surprised because they hadn't intercepted any telltale communications where Russian leaders, military commanders or soldiers discussed plans to invade. America's vaunted global surveillance is a vital tool for U.S. intelligence services, especially as an early-warning system and as a way to corroborate other evidence. In Crimea, though, U.S. intelligence officials are concluding that Russian planners might have gotten a jump on the West by evading U.S. eavesdropping. "Even though there was a warning, we didn't have the information to be able to...

One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It’s time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents. Over the last several weeks, I worked with NBC News to publish a series of articles about “dirty trick” tactics used by GCHQ’s previously secret unit, JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). These were based on four classified GCHQ documents presented to the NSA and the other three partners in...

CIA Director: Jonathan Pollard Is In Prison Because He's JewishBy Karen Levy Israel News AgencyJerusalem — February 9, 2014 ... There have been many senior US officials who have called for Israeli Jonathan Pollard to be released, but none ever came from this highest of security institutions. Former CIA Director James Woolsey has reiterated his call for the immediate release of Jonathan Pollard, now in his 29th year behind American bars over charges of spying for Israel. Speaking to the Israel News Agency, Woolsey stated: "It's enough. After a quarter century the time has come to free Pollard. That doesn't...

Leading members of the House Armed Services Committee emerged from a classified briefing on the Edward Snowden leaks this afternoon “shocked” at the amount of information he reportedly leaked beyond the NSA surveillance programs. Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), chairman of the Armed Service panel’s Intelligence, Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee and also a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said the briefing on the defense consequences of Snowden’s leaks was “very highly classified,” and therefore details couldn’t be discussed. …

The Green group in the European Parliament has nominated whistleblower Edward Snowden for the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, on the last day before a deadline for nomination expires tomorrow (1 February). The Green/EFA group said that the world had discovered in 2013 “the face of a young man, who had overnight become an icon of state treason for some and a heroic defender of the most basic freedoms for many more.” According to the Greens, Snowden’s revelations on US secret services tapping the internet, phone calls and other communications data shed light on the largest and most systematic privacy violations...

The National Security Agency's program collecting records on virtually all U.S. phone calls violates the law, according to a government privacy board. In a 238-page report released Thursday, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board calls for an end to the program, saying it has never stopped a terrorist attack and threatens the privacy of millions of Americans. The report is yet another blow to the controversial program, which was first revealed by Edward Snowden last year. Last Friday, President Obama announced his support for certain reforms to the program, including requiring court approval for the NSA to search through...

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee says Edward Snowden likely received help stealing information from the National Security Agency — and that help may have come from Russian intelligence officials. In a pre-recorded interview for NBC’s “Meet the Press” with David Gregory, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) questioned how the former NSA contractor arranged travel out of the United States before leaking the trove of secret documents and eventually making his way to Russia. “Let me just say this. I believe there’s a reason he ended up in the hands, the loving arms, of an FSB agent in Moscow,” Rogers...

US President Barack Obama has said he will not spy on EU leaders or conduct economic espionage, but will continue snooping on ordinary US and EU citizens.He made the pledge in a TV speech on Friday (17 January) in reaction to the Edward Snowden leaks. “I’ve made clear to the intelligence community that unless there is a compelling national security purpose, we will not monitor the communications of heads of state and government of our close friends and allies,” he said. “We do not collect intelligence to provide a competitive advantage to US companies or US commercial sectors,” he added....

Jan. 13 (UPI) -- Here’s a headline for a story that seems just a bit too out-of-this-world to be true:“Snowden Documents Proving ‘US-Alien-Hitler’ Link Stun Russia” appeared on the website of semi-official Iranian news agency Fars News on Sunday. After previously reporting on subjects like the British royal family being Jewish and Israel's plans to annex Iraq, Fars News may have outdone itself by breaking news that the U.S. government has been run by a "shadow government" of Nazi space aliens since 1945.According to the paper, the information about the secret government of Nazi aliens was provided by NSA leaker...

OBAMA'S CRIMES ARE WORST THAN NIXON'S More Calls for Impeachment of Obama after NSA Ruling Posted on December 22, 2013 by LaRouche Irish Brigade Larry Klayman, the attorney who brought the lawsuit that won a restraining order against the National Security Agency, has called Obama’s crimes far worse than Nixon’s, and is calling for the impeachment for Obama. In an interview with World Net Daily, for which Klayman also writes, he said, “In Watergate, Richard Nixon faced impeachment for breaking into the offices of the chairman of the Democratic National Party….Obama has broken into the homes of 300 million Americans.”...

The journalist from the British Guardian who published some of the documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said on Monday that there are additional leaked documents, unpublished as of yet, relating to Israel. Speaking to Israel’s Channel 10 News, Glenn Greenwald also said that Israel had done the right thing by linking the revelations about American spying on Israeli targets to the continued imprisonment of Jonathan Pollard. Greenwald’s interview comes weeks after leaked documents showed that American spies monitored the email traffic of former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and former Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Greenwald said he had found...