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By Joel Leyden Israel News AgencyJerusalem — January 1, 2015 … Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a discussion this afternoon on the Palestinian Authority’s application to various international treaties, and made the following remarks at the end of the meeting: “We expect the International Criminal Court to reject outright the Palestinian Authority’s hypocritical act because the Palestinian Authority is not a state,” said Netanyahu. “It is an entity in alliance with a terrorist organization, Hamas, which perpetuates war crimes. The State of Israel is a nation of laws with a moral army that upholds international law. We will defend...

Ecuador's government has ordered everyone in the US Embassy's military group, about 20 Defense Department employees, to leave the country by month's end. The group was ordered to halt operations in Ecuador in a letter dated April 7, embassy spokesman Jeffrey Weinshenker said Thursday. The Associated Press was alerted to the expulsions by a senior Ecuadorean official who refused to be identified by name due to the information's sensitive nature.

Acting Head of the Samaria Regional Council, Yossi Dagan, has filed a request to the Minister of the Interior Gilad Erdan demanding he immediately expel the American Consulate staff members who entered the Samaria village of Adei Ad Friday and threatened Israeli Jews with an M-16. "As revealed through Wikileaks few years ago, these supposed 'officials' are intelligence agents and spies in every respect," said Dagan, adding "this time, they went too far and participated in a provocative tour with the Palestinians in the southern Samaria and north Binyamin, without any coordination as required with the IDF and police, and...

The Palestinian Authority (PA) has decided to join the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol), an official told the Ma’an news agency on Saturday. […] Ahmad al-Rabie said that the PA submitted a request to join the Interpol in 2011 but that it was only accepted as an observer and not as a full member because it had not been recognized as a state at the time and did not have control over its borders. This time, however, the PA is sure that 128 countries will vote in favor of the state joining Interpol, four above the required threshold, al-Rabie told...

If you want a truly anonymous life, then maybe it's time you learned about Tor, CSpace and ZRTP. These three technologies could help people hide their activities from the National Security Agency, according to NSA documents newly obtained from the archive of former contractor Edward Snowden by the German magazine Der Spiegel. The combination of Tor, CSpace and ZRTP (plus another anonymizing technology for good measure) results in levels of protection that the NSA deems "catastrophic" -- meaning the organization has "near-total loss/lack of insight to target communications," according to Der Spiegel. "Although the documents are around two years old,...

Regardless of whether you are enthusiastic about conspiracy theories or not, Global Research's claim that 'former National Security Agency (NSA) systems analyst Edward Snowden recently revealed that the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi was trained by the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence and spy agency' is a topic worthy of debate.

Edward Snowden's in-depth interview with James Bamford of Wired offers details about his last job as a contractor for the NSA in Honolulu, which raise disconcerting questions about the motives of the former systems administrator. While working at two consecutive jobs in Hawaii from March 2012 to May 2013, the 31-year-old allegedly stole about 200,000 "tier 1 and 2" documents, which mostly detailed the NSA's global surveillance apparatus and were given to American journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras in June 2013. The government believes Snowden also took up to 1.5 million "tier 3" documents potentially detailing U.S. capabilities and...

The NSA cyberwarfare program, called MonsterMind, uses software to look for traffic patterns indicating possible foreign cyberattacks, according to Snowden, quoted in a lengthy profile in Wired. MonsterMind could automatically block a cyberattack from entering the U.S., then retaliate against the attackers, according to the Wired story. Snowden, when he was working as an NSA contractor, was concerned that MonsterMind could lead to misdirected counterattacks. "These attacks can be spoofed," he told Wired. "You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we end up shooting...

It’s been a busy month on the privacy front.For starters, word got out on August 5 that Russian hackers stole 1.2 billion user names and passwords across several kinds of websites. Then Facebook got into hot water — again — when it decided to force its risky Messenger app on unwilling users. Meanwhile, a U.S. senator warned that users of wearable fitness-tracking devices are unprotected by any privacy law, putting them at serious risk. And the European Union is poised to counter a U.S. court order demanding Microsoft hand over data stored inside its Irish servers.Meanwhile, hackers and snoops...

PARIS -- A newly leaked document stolen by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden last year reveals that one of the NSA's partner agencies within the "Five Eyes" Anglo-intelligence network -- Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), responsible for signals intelligence -- dedicated vast resources to fooling around on the Internet, according to journalist Glenn Greenwald. The GCHQ has reportedly developed tools capable of playing with the results of online polls; sending out spoof emails and Microsoft Office documents that, once opened, can grab and transmit files and info from a user's computer; collecting data from public profiles on...

Democratic U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim to serve in Congress, said a report that the National Security Agency and FBI were tracking the email of five prominent American Muslims is “troubling because it suggests that Americans were targeted because of their faith and civic engagement.” Documents leaked by former government contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the Muslim attorneys and activists were targeted for surveillance from 2002 to 2008 under a program meant to uncover terrorists and foreign agents, according to an analysis from online news organization The Intercept. Among the documents released were training materials that used the...

NEW YORK — Heaps of baby photos, fitness selfies, medical records and resumes are among thousands of private communications scooped up and stored by NSA spy programs. That’s according to new disclosures based on documents Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, gave to The Washington Post — disclosures that show just how easy it is for Americans’ private conversations to be swept into the spy agency’s traps. Snowden provided the Post with what it said were 160,000 intercepted conversations, including e-mails, instant messages, photographs, social network posts and other documents. The trove included messages exchanged from 2009 through...

The National Security Agency recently used a novel argument for not holding onto information it collects about users online activity: it's too complex. The agency is facing a slew of lawsuits over its surveillance programs, many launched after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked information on the agency's efforts last year. One suit that pre-dates the Snowden leaks, Jewel v. NSA, challenges the constitutionality of programs that the suit allege collect information about American's telephone and Internet activities. In a hearing Friday, U.S. District for the Northern District of California Judge Jeffrey S. White reversed an emergency order he had...

This week German news magazine Der Spiegel published the largest single set of files leaked by whistleblower and former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The roughly 50 documents show the depth of the German intelligence agencies' collusion with the NSA. They suggest that the German Intelligence Agency (BND), the country's foreign spy agency, and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), the German domestic spy agency, worked more closely with the NSA than they have admitted - and more than many observers thought.

Will Glenn Greenwald be releasing the names collected by Edward Snowden of Americans spied upon by the NSA this week? Tomorrow or Tuesday would be the PERFECT days to release such names. Why? Because Tuesday is the the official date of the release of Hillary's ghost written book to the public and such a release of names would suck the oxygen out of its publicity.

Full Title: Oliver Stone signs on to direct Edward Snowden biopic: ‘It is one of the greatest stories of our time’/// Oliver Stone doesn’t shy away from controversial topics and his latest movie project is no exception. The Oscar-winning director announced Monday that he will tackle a film based on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the Guardian reports. Stone’s film was based on an adaptation of Guardian journalist Luke Harding’s book, “The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man.” Harding and other Guardian journalists will serve as consultants to the film. “This is one of the greatest...

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."