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The new director of the National Security Agency on Tuesday acknowledged that the agency uses facial-recognition tools but said the intent is primarily to identify terrorists and help prevent attacks — adding that such technologies are not broadly directed against Americans. “We do not do this on some unilateral basis against U.S. citizens,” said Adm. Michael S. Rogers, in some of his first public remarks since taking the helm of the embattled spy agency two months ago. A year after the first leaks emerged about the scope of NSA surveillance programs, Rogers is seeking to reframe the public debate that...

Judging from her fading smile, it appears that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi thought her meeting with a group of teenagers would be an easy photo op with no hard questions. She was wrong.

This is Secretary of State John Kerry’s answer.... “He should man up, come back to the United States. If he has a complaint about what’s wrong with American surveillance, come back here and stand in our system of justice and make his case....” The argument has a specious attractiveness; however, its premises are arbitrary, its logic shaky, and its implications pernicious. ...It is true that some disobedients, such as Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Rosa Parks, did not seek to evade punishment. It is also true, however, that they could not possibly have done so, for...

The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents. The spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications, the N.S.A. documents reveal. Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the N.S.A. finds intelligence targets around the world, the documents show....

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.

Ten years before Edward Snowden revealed his bombshell that the United States government was electronically spying on people on a massive scale there was Bay Area-resident Mark Klein. Nannett Miranda reports. Ten years before Edward Snowden revealed his bombshell that the United States government was electronically spying on people on a massive scale there was Bay Area resident Mark Klein. As a San Francisco-based AT&T technician in 2003, he installed a splitter that sent a copy of communications data to a secret room set up by the NSA in his South of Market office building. "I knew right away that...

Video:New reporting seems to confirm government leaker Edward Snowden’s claim that he tried to bring his concerns up the chain of command before leaking top-secret documents to the press. “I actually did go through channels, and that is documented,” he told NBC in an interview on Wednesday evening. “The NSA [National Security Agency] has records, they have copies of emails right now to their Office of General Counsel, to their oversight and compliance folks, from me raising concerns about the NSA’s interpretations of its legal authorities.”[snip]n the April 5, 2013, email, he questioned the spy agency’s legal rationale for snooping...

Thanks to Edward Snowden, we know the apparatus of repression has been covertly attached to the democratic state. However, our struggle to retain privacy is far from hopeless.

Glenn Greenwald, one of the reporters who chronicled the document dump by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden via the U.K. press, now said he’s set to publish his most dramatic piece yet: The names of those in the United States targeted by the NSA. “One of the big questions when is comes to domestic spying is, ‘Who have been the NSA’s specific targets?’ Are they political critics and dissidents and activists? Are they genuinely people we’d regard as terrorists? What are the metrics and calculations that go into choosing those targets and what is done with the surveillance that...

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.

Edward J. Snowden says he was not merely a “low-level analyst” writing computer code for American spies, as President Obama and other administration officials have portrayed him. Instead, he says, he was a trained spy who worked under assumed names overseas for the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. “I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word in that I lived and worked undercover overseas — pretending to work in a job that I’m not — and even being assigned a name that was not mine,” Mr. Snowden told Brian Williams...

Former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked details of massive U.S. intelligence-gathering programs, said in a U.S. TV interview he "was trained as a spy" and had worked undercover overseas for U.S. government agencies. In an advance excerpt of his interview in Moscow with "NBC Nightly News" that aired on Tuesday, Snowden rejected comments by critics that he was a low-level analyst. "Well, it's no secret that the U.S. tends to get more and better intelligence out of computers nowadays than they do out of people," Snowden told NBC news anchor Brian Williams. "I was trained as a...

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.

The U.S. House passed the USA Freedom Act in gutted form May 22, forcing most of its original sponsors to vote against the legislation. USA Freedom Act Gutted Before House Passage; Heads to Senate The New American 26 May 2014 The USA Freedom Act — written in its original form by Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) and designed to ban the omnipresent collection of private U.S. citizens’ data by the NSA without a judicial warrant — was passed in gutted form May 22. The act is likely to be further watered down as it heads to the Senate, as senators...

BEIJING -- A Chinese Internet information body has complained of "unscrupulous" surveillance by U.S. intelligence agencies over the rest of the world, and called for an immediate cessation of the practice. A report by China's Internet Media Research Center published on Monday said the U.S. has taken advantage of its political, economic, military and technological hegemony to spy without restraint on other countries, including its allies. The operations have gone "far beyond the legal rationale of 'anti-terrorism' and have exposed the ugly face of its pursuit of self-interest in complete disregard for moral integrity," the report read. It added that...

The Erie County sheriff says he's done making public comments about a cellphone surveillance device used by his police agency to gather information on persons of interest. Sheriff Tim Howard told WGRZ Thursday that he won't publicly discuss the matter any longer because doing so could adversely impact investigations. A stingray is a device that mimics a cell tower and thereby tricks all wireless devices on the same network into communicating with it. Howard told Erie County legislators last week that the stingray surveillance device his office has owned since 2008 is used only for tracking a person's movements, not...

The USA Freedom Act, once lauded by privacy and technology groups, passed the House today in a watered-down form. After nearly a year of revelations about the shocking extent of the National Security Agency’s surveillance efforts, lawmakers have finally passed legislation limiting the agency’s ability to collect information on American citizens. But if you were hoping for the kind of rock-solid reform that guarantees the agency won’t be able to cast enormous nets for your phone and Internet data, don’t hold your breath. The USA Freedom Act, which passed Thursday in the House of Representatives 303-121, was initially lauded by...

What if the federal government is shameless? What if it personifies the adage of do as I say and not as I do? What if it does the very things it prosecutes others for doing? What if it has written laws and enacted procedures so that it can spy and kill, while it charges others with doing just that? What if the feds recently indicted five low-level Chinese military officers for spying on American corporations? What if the feds accused these officers of using their computers in Beijing to hack into computers in Denver that are not owned by the...

A tech industry group that has Facebook and Google as participants has rejected the latest draft of a U.S. legislation that aims to put curbs on surveillance by the National Security Agency.The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama on Wednesday said it supported swift passage of the USA Freedom Act by the U.S. House of Representatives, and urged the Senate to follow suit."Overall, the bill's significant reforms would provide the public greater confidence in our programs and the checks and balances in the system," the White House said in a statement.But the tech companies, which also include Yahoo, AOL, Apple,...

In the dystopian future of George Orwell's "1984," the government uses an endless state of war to justify food rationing by the Ministry of Plenty, rewriting history by the Ministry of Truth, and brutal interrogation by the Ministry of Love. Recently, President Obama's Privacy Working Group -- a response to the public outcry over the mass collection of telephone data -- concluded that the government needed to collect and review more private data. It's tempting to think, "you couldn't make this up." But, of course, Orwell imagined it in detail. The working group's report contains several mundane policy recommendations to...