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An employee of Germany's intelligence agency has been arrested on suspicion of spying for the US, reports say. The man is said to have been trying to gather details about a German parliamentary committee that is investigating claims of US espionage. German media say the man arrested this week is a 31-year-old employee of the federal intelligence agency, known as the BND. The German federal prosecutor's office confirmed the man's arrest, but gave no other details. A spokesman for Ms Merkel said she had been informed of the arrest, as had the members of the nine-strong parliamentary committee investigating the...

Believe it or not, it was 10 years ago this month that Barack Obama, then a candidate for the U.S. Senate, introduced himself to America with a speech that shook the Fleet Center in Boston. The main theme of that Democratic convention was the litany of George W. Bush's failures — an unpopular and unending war in Iraq, a faltering image abroad, a stagnating middle class. Obama gave eloquent voice to those frustrations, arguing that all of them could be addressed if only we reunited the electorate. Probably Obama himself would not have guessed then that he would ascend to...

The Snowden leak that journalist Glenn Greenwald has described as the biggest story yet was delayed prior to publication this week, after the U.S. government made last-minute claims about the forthcoming disclosure.

Just because the initial collection of intelligence is legal doesn’t mean it should be if it catches American citizens’ communications. A bill in Congress would fix that. On June 20, the House of Representatives passed a defense spending bill with an amendment that would substantially strengthen the privacy protections of American citizens in the context of foreign intelligence surveillance. The amendment, which passed by an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 293-123, should be quickly and enthusiastically approved by the Senate and then signed into law by President Obama. Complicating matters, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which makes recommendations to...

An independent privacy and civil liberties board says the NSA’s massive collection of internet data passes constitutional muster and employs “reasonable” protections designed to ensure that private American communications are not misused. In a report released Tuesday night, the bipartisan, five-member Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board examined a set of NSA surveillance programs disclosed by leaker Edward Snowden …

The other shoe just dropped when it comes to how the federal government illegally spies on Americans. Last summer, the details of the NSA's "backdoor searches" were revealed. This involved big collections of content and metadata (so, no, not "just metadata" as meaningless as that phrase is) that were collected under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA). This is part of the program that the infamous PRISM effort operates under, and which allows the NSA to collect all sorts of content, including communications to, from or about a "target" -- where a "target" can be incredibly loosely defined...

Instead of a no-spy deal, the US has begun a Cyber Dialogue with Germany. In a Spiegel interview, John Podesta, a special advisor to President Barack Obama, speaks of the balance between alliances and security and says that changes are being made to NSA espionage practices. […] “(W)ith respect to what German citizens think, the United States has a pretty good track record of standing up for values of global democracy, of free expression, of protecting the rights of individuals, of trying to ensure that people are not discriminated against, of not suppressing free speech. Every country has a history...

Light bulbs can now send and receive data thanks to a California company that has added sensors into each power hub. Although these smart lights can monitor pollution or spot an unattended bag at an airport, their ability to track our every move raises privacy concerns. Bill Whitaker reports.

Tomorrow at 9am ET, I'm doing a @reddit_AMA with @MazMHussain about our new NSA story to be published tonight at midnight on @the_intercept

A California-based group that has been battling the National Security Agency for years in lawsuits flew a giant blimp over Utah's NSA Data Center Friday.

The German government is ending a contract with Verizon over fears the company could be letting U.S. intelligence agencies eavesdrop on sensitive communications, officials said Thursday. The New York-based company has for years provided Internet services to a number of government departments, although not to German security agencies, said Interior Ministry spokesman Tobias Plate. […] German authorities were particularly irked by reports that the NSA had targeted Chancellor Angela Merkel. Berlin has also proposed building more secure networks in Europe to avoid having to rely on American Internet companies that manage much of the electronic traffic circulating the globe. …

The United States will enact legislation giving European Union citizens the right to sue in the United States if they think their private data was released or misused, the U.S attorney general said on Wednesday. "The Obama administration is committed to seeking legislation that would ensure that ... EU citizens would have the same right to seek judicial redress for intentional or wilful disclosures of protected information and for refusal to grant access or to rectify any errors in that information, as would a U.S citizen," Attorney General Eric Holder told reporters. "This commitment - which has long been sought...

Microsoft's top lawyer says the fallout of the NSA spying scandal is "getting worse," and carries grim implications for US tech companies. In a speech at the GigaOm Structure conference in San Francisco on Thursday, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith warned attendees that unless the US political establishment figures out how to rein in its spy agencies, there could be heavy repercussions for tech companies "What we've seen since last June is a double-digit decline in people's trust in American tech companies in key places like Brussels and Berlin and Brasilia. This has put trust at risk," Smith said. "The...

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.

A Congressional inquiry into the targeting of Tea Party and Conservative organizations by the IRS has revealed that thousands of emails from IRS head Lois Lerner and at least six of her subordinates have been lost to history after the hard drive which stored them was reportedly thrown away. The loss of the emails makes it nearly impossible to track down and verify what actually took place and whether or not the Obama administration was directly involved in the harassment of independent groups that didn’t agree with the President’s political platform.Without the emails their is no accountability, despite the fact...

ProtonMail is a new email service that is developed by a team of scientists working at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. Our goal is simple: we want to protect people around the world from the mass surveillance that is currently being perpetrated by governments and corporations around the world. We believe that privacy is a fundamental human right that must be protected at any cost. The advent of the internet has now made all of us more vulnerable to mass surveillance than at any other point in human history. The disappearance of online privacy is...

Three senators are doubling down on their call for a sweeping end to the National Security Agency’s “dragnet surveillance.” Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.) pledged on Tuesday to fight against “limited” and “watered down” legislation to reform the spy agency, which they said includes the bill that passed the House last month. “This is clearly not the meaningful reform that Americans have demanded, so we will vigorously oppose this bill in its current form and continue to push for real changes to the law,” they wrote in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times....

WASHINGTON (AP) — The CIA and other spy agencies are scrambling to close intelligence gaps as they seek ways to support possible military or covert action against the leaders of the al-Qaida-inspired militant group that has seized parts of Iraq and threatens Baghdad's government. The lack of clear intelligence appears to have shifted President Barack Obama's immediate focus away from airstrikes in Iraq because officials said there are few obvious targets. However, officials said no final decisions had been made and suggested Obama ultimately could approve strikes if strong targets do become available. As the U.S. intensifies its intelligence collection...

Anyone here who gets the constant calls from "Rachel from Cardmemeber Services" or the Myriad of calls from all the other cell phone robocallers that offer to re-finance your home or credit card and are really just phishing for your credit card number or credit information. These damned fraudsters will call your cell phone with unsolicted calls (which is illegal by the way) and your home phone as well. They always seem to start with a pre-recorded message saying to press 1 which then routes you to a live operator who will take your information if you are gulible to...

Pressed to supply information in response to lawsuits charging that its widespread surveillance of US citizens is illegal, NSA Deputy Director Richard Ledgett contends that his agency cannot comply because “we’ve lost control over our computer system. We couldn’t retrieve the subpoenaed information if we wanted to. It’s like some kind of ‘Skynet’–alien and artificial intelligence has blocked access to all our data.” Ledgett told US District for the Northern District of California Judge Jeffrey White “we’re as scared about this as anyone. We don’t know who’s side the computer is on. We’d like to think that since we programmed...