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House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was booed onstage Saturday when she said former government contractor Edward Snowden broke the law by leaking classified documents on National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance programs. Speaking at the NetRoots Nation conference in San Jose, Calif., Pelosi told the audience to reject comparisons between President Barack Obama and his predecessor, President George W. Bush, on their oversight of surveillance programs. The top House Democrat said Obama is poised to reveal "in another few days, a few more proceedings" of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Pelosi received the loudest boos and heckles from the...

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a statement concerning the retention of metadata collected in accordance with section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. “On June 29, 2015, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court George Bush. The Patriot Act originated on his watch George Bush. The Patriot Act originated on his watch approved the Government’s application to resume the Section 215 bulk telephone metadata program pursuant to the USA FREEDOM Act’s 180-day transition provision. As part of our effort to transition to the new authority, we have evaluated whether NSA should maintain access to the historical metadata after the...

The self-proclaimed Islamic State has used National Security Agency documents stolen by former contractor Edward Snowden to evade U.S. intelligence services, officials told the New York Times in a Tuesday story. The Times reported that fact deep in a story on the group’s efforts to evade and recover from American and Iraqi military strikes. Documents stolen and leaked to reporters by Snowden, who remains in hiding in Russia, have led to changes in IS operations that have prevented U.S. forces from gathering intelligence on the group, the Times reported. The Islamic State has also studied revelations from Edward J. Snowden,...

Larry Klayman, former federal prosecutor for the Justice Department and the founder of Judicial Watch and now Freedom Watch, announced the filing of a lawsuit against the American Civil Liberties Union (“ACLU”), and certain of its attorneys for violating their fiduciary duty and attorney client relationship, as well as defaming NSA/CIA whistleblower Dennis Montgomery. The complaint was filed in federal court in Miami, Florida (Case No. 15-cv-22452). Montgomery sought legal assistance from the ACLU with regard to his whistleblowing of the unconstitutional and illegal acts by the NSA and CIA, much like the disclosures of Edward Snowden. Montgomery possesses information...

The NSA and its British counterpart the GCHQ have put extensive effort into hacking popular security software products to “track users and infiltrate networks,” according to the latest round of Snowden docs unearthed today by The Intercept. Cybersecurity companies, including the Moscow-headquartered Kaspersky Lab, were targeted by government agencies to gain intelligence of the latest exploits. Details of the security software’s inner workings were deciphered by agencies through a process called software reverse engineering (SRE), which allowed them to analyze and exploit the software suites. A top-secret warrant renewal request issued by the GCHQ details the motivations behind infiltrating the...

In the two years since the Edward Snowden saga went public, a handful of people who actually understand the Western signals intelligence system have tried to explain the many ways that the Snowden Operation has smeared NSA and its partners with salacious charges of criminality and abuse. I’ve been one of the public faces of what may be called the Snowden Truth movement, and finally there are signs that reality may be intruding on this debate. No American ally was rocked harder by Snowden’s allegations than Germany, which has endured a bout of hysteria over charges that NSA was listening...

While UK government officials are said to have been briefing the Sunday Times that the Russians and the Chinese have managed to “crack” the encryption on the Snowden files, cyber-security experts have been casting doubt on the credibility of the story. The Sunday Times reported this weekend that the top-secret cache of files stolen by Edward Snowden from his former employer the NSA had been decrypted by Russia and China, forcing MI6 to pull agents out of live operations in hostile countries. The story was built around anonymous briefings by officials from Downing Street, the Home Office and the security...

MI6 has pulled its spies out of 'hostile countries' and America's intelligence agencies are on high alert after Russia and China cracked encrypted files leaked by fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden. The top-secret documents contain information that could lead to the identification of British and American spies, according to senior officials in Downing Street, the Home Office and the security services. A senior Home Office official accused Snowden - the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor responsible for the biggest confidential information leak in US history - of having 'blood on his hands' after they gained access to over one million...

The man playing the role of Edward Snowden in the $300 million Oregon production of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will not rot in prison for blowing the whistle on former governor John A. Kitzhaber—who in this Left Coast drama was playing the role of Hillary R. Clinton. Michael Rodgers was the interim administrator of the state's Enterprise Technology Services division of the Department of Administrative Services and a man with 200 employees under his sway and 15 years on the books when Feb. 5 Jan Murdock sent him an email directing him to destroy all of the...

Britain has pulled out agents from live operations in "hostile countries" after Russia and China cracked top-secret information contained in files leaked by former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, the Sunday Times reported. Security service MI6, which operates overseas and is tasked with defending British interests, has removed agents from certain countries, the newspaper said, citing unnamed officials at the office of British Prime Minister David Cameron, the Home Office (interior ministry) and security services. SNIP Russia and China have both managed to crack encrypted documents which contain details of secret intelligence techniques that could allow British and...

Earlier this spring, the cybersecurity firm Kaspersky was testing an advanced antivirus software on one of its computers when it stumbled on something big: As the Moscow-based company puts it, it was "one of the most skilled, mysterious and powerful" spy viruses in the world. The piece of software was so sophisticated that it left few traces. It didn't leave files on the disk drive, and to stay hidden, it burrowed inside a computer's kernel memory, which is the place where a computer's most basic software is kept.Kaspersky says it assigned a team to watch its movements, and the team...

Well, this is a new one.While announcing his candidacy for the highest office in the land, newly minted Democratic presidential candidate and former Rhode Island senator and governor Lincoln Chafee made the bold case for … the U.S. to switch to the metric system?Bloomberg's Dave Weigel was there: Chafee, a Republican-turned-independent-turned-Democrat, gave a brief and chipper address that called for America to re-engage with "international community" with diplomacy and "symbolic" moves. That meant everything from barring campaign donors from becoming diplomats, to allowing Edward Snowden to come home without punishment, to bringing America into the Metric system."It doesn't take long...

The famous (and in some circles infamous) former CIA infrastructure analyst Edward Snowden has written an op-ed for the New York Times about what he calls “a post-terror generation” that’s ”finally standing up for the right to privacy.” Snowden first explains that when he sounded the alarm about the NSA’s ridiculously broad spying program he was persecuted and deemed a traitor (which is why he had to flee to Russia). In the years since, though, a lot has changed: "Two years on, the difference is profound. In a single month, the N.S.A.’s invasive call-tracking program was declared unlawful by the...

To say that the Daily Kos, Democratic Underground, and other progressive sites have carried the water for Obama since he emerged on the national stage is a drastic understatement. They've covered up lies, downplayed scandals, accused Republicans of everything from rape to murder, and through it all declared Barack Obama as one of their greatest heroes. It takes a lot to turn the opinions of blinded sheep like these. And while they have yet to awaken to who the President really is, the NSA scandal and the government's stance on Edward Snowden has started to make them hate the man...

The National Security Agency and its closest allies planned to hijack data links to Google and Samsung app stores to infect smartphones with spyware, a top-secret document reveals. The surveillance project was launched by a joint electronic eavesdropping unit called the Network Tradecraft Advancement Team, which includes spies from each of the countries in the “Five Eyes” alliance — the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia. The top-secret document, obtained from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, was published Wednesday by CBC News in collaboration with The Intercept. The document outlines a series of tactics that the NSA...

An American cyberattack on North Korea half a decade ago was fruitless overall, sources say. The National Security Agency (NSA) led a mission in 2010 to damage North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, Reuters reported on Friday. Operatives tried using a variant of the Stuxnet computer virus deployed against Iran that same year, the news service said, with developers crafting a version that would activate once it reached Korean-language settings on targeted machines. Operatives hoped the virus would disable centrifuges for enriching uranium, much like it had when used against Iran, Reuters said, but the cyberattack stumbled when it encountered North...

Donald Trump broached the idea of execution for National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden for the second time in a week Monday. "I think Snowden is a terrible threat, I think he's a terrible traitor, and you know what we used to do in the good old days when we were a strong country? You know what we used to do to traitors, right?" Trump said on the "Fox & Friends" program. "Well, you killed them, Donald," host Eric Bolling replied. Trump appears highly distressed with the whole affair. Snowden is in a Moscow airport, and the U.S. government wants...

The National Security Agency planned to infiltrate the Google and Samsung app stores to plant spying software on smartphones, according to new documents published from files leaked by Edward Snowden. The Intercept and CBC News jointly published the documents Thursday, which outline the snooping efforts designed by the U.S. and its “Five Eyes” alliance: Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia. The intelligence agencies came up with the strategy as a potential way to hack smartphones. The pilot project was code-named “IRRITANT HORN.” Essentially, the agents sussed out smartphone Internet traffic by browsing through its Web traffic database created...

Even though Edward Snowden is in exile in Moscow, he's still hard at work — although he won't reveal what exactly he is working on quite yet because he believes in being judged on the results. Whatever he's working on, the former NSA contractor who exposed controversial US surveillance practices, says it's much tougher than his last gig. "The fact is I was getting paid an extraordinary amount of money for very little work with very little in the way of qualifications. That's changed significantly," Snowden said in an event at Stanford University on Friday, via teleconference from Moscow. "I...

A US appeals court has ruled that the NSA's dragnet of millions of Americans' phone calls is illegal, and Edward Snowden served as the catalyst for the decision. "Americans first learned about the telephone metadata program that appellants now challenge on June 5, 2013, when the British newspaper The Guardian published a FISC order leaked by former government contractor Edward Snowden," the court noted.