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**SNIP** Harold Martin is scheduled to plead guilty to one count of willful retention of national defense information on January 22 in a federal court in Baltimore, according to court filings, Reuters reported. Prosecutors said that the ex-NSA contractor spent two decades taking classified government information from the U.S. intelligence community and hoarded the secrets at his home in Maryland. The Justice Department accused Martin in 2016 of a “breathtaking” theft of government secrets. During a raid of his home, authorities seized dozens of laptops and digital devices in addition to six full bankers’ boxes worth of documents.

For years Americans' right to privacy, as granted by the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, has come under threat as the country's surveillance systems have grown. After intelligence leaks by former National Security Agency employee Edward Snowden, however, the NSA's domestic dragnet is finally getting the attention that many people feel it deserves.

eBay Founder Pierre Omidyar is starting a news outlet called First Look Media. In the site's animated video, he describes it as "a new kind of marriage between a technology company and a new kind of newsroom," and that one of its goals will be to "make it easier for journalists to deliver the transformative stories we all need." Omidyar is known as a philanthropist, and has put his money where his mouth is (in this case, he is reportedly investing $250 million in the First Look venture). His Omidyar Network - with its funding of many altruistic initiatives such...

Germany's foreign intelligence service long spied on numerous official and business targets in the United States, including the White House, Spiegel weekly reported Thursday. The magazine said it had seen documents showing that the intelligence service, the BND, had a list of some 4,000 so-called selector keywords for surveillance between 1998 and 2006. These included telephone or fax numbers, as well as email addresses at the White House as well as the US finance and foreign ministries. Other monitoring targets ranged from military institutions including the US Air Force or the Marine Corps, space agency NASA to civic group Human...

... n unprecedented report from the corporate press claims U.S. forces have participated in extreme torture and abuse of detainees accused of affiliation with Al Qaeda in Yemen — including “the ‘grill,’ in which the victim is tied to a spit like a roast and spun in a circle of fire,” the Associated Press finds. A network of secretive prisons in southern Yemen provide the backdrop for the alleged barbaric acts allegedly carried out by forces from the U.S. and United Arab Emirates — many of those detention facilities remain hidden in plain sight. That some of the covert prisons...

A senior security database program officer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence had at least 14 freelance jobs, performed hundreds of illegal searches and admitted to spending approximately “all day” on Facebook. The findings are contained in a heavily redacted 32-page report compiled in late 2014 by the Office of the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community and made public Wednesday by Buzzfeed journalist Jason Leopold.

World News | Thu Jun 15, 2017 | 11:48am EDT Putin quips he's ready to grant asylum to ex-FBI chief Comey By Dmitry Solovyov and Vladimir Soldatkin | MOSCOW Russian President Vladimir Putin joked on Thursday that if former FBI director James Comey suffers persecution because of his falling-out with U.S. President Donald Trump, Russia is ready to grant him asylum. The offer, made with Putin's trademark sardonic humor, came as the Russian president poured scorn on Comey for his role in a row in Washington over alleged Russian meddling in last year's U.S. presidential election. At a congressional hearing...

“She called us yesterday night. She asked if we could help out with relocating her cat and dog,” Winner-Davis said. Winner-Davis said her daughter never talked about her work, and her family did not know the specifics of her recently acquired job as a government contractor. She added that her daughter, while quiet about her job, was outspoken about her beliefs. “She’s very passionate. Very passionate about her views and things like that, but she’s never to my knowledge been active in politics or any of that,” said Winner-Davis. On Twitter, she expressed frequent dissatisfaction with Trump administration policies, and...

U.S. intelligence has collected information that Russia is considering turning over Edward Snowden as a "gift" to President Donald Trump — who has called the NSA leaker a "spy" and a "traitor" who deserves to be executed. That's according to a senior U.S. official who has analyzed a series of highly sensitive intelligence reports detailing Russian deliberations and who says a Snowden handover is one of various ploys to "curry favor" with Trump. A second source in the intelligence community confirms the intelligence about the Russian conversations and notes it has been gathered since the inauguration. Snowden's ACLU lawyer, Ben...

In an interview with Katie Couric for Yahoo Global News, Edward Snowden (shown) said what many already know: America has a “two-tiered system of justice.” People with political value and government connections are handled with kid gloves when they mishandle or disclose classified information, even when it is for their own gain, while others — those with no political value or government connections — are given the iron fist for mishandling or disclosing classified information, even if it is for the public good.Answering a question about what a plea deal would look like in his case, Snowden said he wasn’t...

WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. secretly arrested a National Security Agency contractor in recent weeks and is investigating whether he stole and disclosed highly classified computer codes developed to hack into the networks of foreign governments, according to several senior law enforcement and intelligence officials. The theft raises the embarrassing prospect that for the second time in three years, an insider has managed to steal highly damaging secret information from the N.S.A. In 2013, Edward J. Snowden, who was also a contractor for the agency, took a vast trove of documents that were later passed to journalists, exposing N.S.A. surveillance programs...

BERLIN – Edward Snowden is increasingly unhappy with the situation in Russia, where he has lived for more than three years. President Vladimir Putin once welcomed the National Security Agency contractor for his propaganda value, but he may be wondering if it’s all been worth it. Snowden arrived in Moscow in June 2013. That was almost a year before the Crimea annexation, and Russia could still try to sell itself to radical leftists who admired Snowden as the lesser evil, compared with the Big Brother United States. Putin talked a lot about Snowden, showing obvious delight for thumbing his nose...

Remember the outrage when CIA operative Valerie Plame’s name was leaked to newspaperman Robert Novak? Plame and her husband, Joe Wilson, accused the Bush White House of doing it in retaliation, because her husband was a critic of its war policy. Wilson said it would be “fun to see Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs.” Only one problem: Rove didn’t do it. The State Department’s Richard Armitage did. Now the worm has turned. Last week, Glenn Greenwald, the man who helped Edward Snowden get stolen American secrets published, wrote an article naming the woman — a...

WikiLeaks has issued an encrypted file for download as a kind of “torrent insurance” ahead of its public release of potentially damning documents. As previously discussed on Inquisitr, Guccifer 2.0’s hack of the DNC servers have already revealed possible collusion between the Hillary Clinton campaign, the mainstream media, and Democratic Party leadership. While the DNC has neither confirmed nor denied the authenticity of these preliminary releases, WikiLeaks’s torrent insurance prior to the actual document dump could indicate the presence of damaging evidence on Clinton, and possibly even the Obama administration. Famed government whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted out a message regarding...

It only took two sentences for Edward Snowden to eviscerate Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server Wednesday morning. The former National Intelligence Agency contractor could face decades in prison for breaking laws governing the handling of classified government information, and he expressed confusion on why Hillary Clinton doesn’t share his fate.

Former Attorney Gen. Eric Holder’s contention that former NSA contractor Edward Snowden performed a “public service” by leaking classified documents is “outrageous,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday. “That’s a truly outrageous comment,” the Kentucky senator told Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” program. “It makes me glad I voted against confirming him. He’s the worst attorney general in history.” […] McConnell, pivoting to his book, recounted behind-the-scenes dealings with President Barack Obama, saying that it was Vice President Joe Biden who was the one who could really get things done. “The president is a very smart guy, but I...

By now, almost everyone knows what Edward Snowden did. He leaked top-secret documents revealing that the National Security Agency was spying on hundreds of millions of people across the world, collecting the phone calls and emails of virtually everyone on Earth who used a mobile phone or the internet. When this newspaper began publishing the NSA documents in June 2013, it ignited a fierce political debate that continues to this day – about government surveillance, but also about the morality, legality and civic value of whistleblowing. Sign up to the long read email Read more But if you want to...

"From our standpoint, it’s not a good thing," Clapper said of accelerated advancements in encryption technology. Whistle-blower Edward Snowden, by leaking classified data two years ago, contributed to the acceleration of sophisticated encryption methods that militants are using to hide their communications, National Intelligence Director James Clapper said Monday. The rapid advancement of commercially available encryption software is proving to be a difficult obstacle in detecting potential threats, he said at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. "From our standpoint, it's not a good thing," he said of the rapidly advancing encryption, adding that the software has had...

President Obama’s latest defense of Hillary Clinton has struck a nerve with both the GOP and government leakers such as Edward Snowden. The president’s comments — “there’s classified and then there’s classified” — suggested some classified information is more sensitive than other classified information, uniting in scorn critics across the political spectrum. To advocates for government transparency, the remarks stunk of duplicity by suggesting that federal classification rules are arbitrary and don't apply to the Democratic presidential front-runner. “If only I had known,” tweeted Snowden, the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who fled the country in 2013 before leaking...

And so, just like that, with a sweeping victory in South Carolina, Sanders' Socialism crawls back into its cage and crony capitalism is alive and well. As Edward Snowden so perfectly sums up... .