Free Republic

A new report based on NSA documents taken by Edward Snowden has revealed the names of prominent American Muslims whose emails it claims were monitored by the FBI and the NSA for years – the most specific allegation yet of the U.S. government's domestic spying and one that officials said could compromise ongoing operations. The report, published overnight by Glenn Greenwald at the fledgling news outlet The Intercept, identifies five of some 202 “U.S. Persons” listed in NSA documents whose emails were allegedly swept up over a six-year period ending in 2008: Nihad Awad, Executive Director of CAIR, the largest...

"I just Googled “America showtimes” and got one hit towards the bottom which redirects you to a different site that makes you have to click another couple times before finding showtimes. For pretty much every other single movie you google the title and showtimes and the first hit is showtimes at the theaters nearest you."

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...

A few days ago, we asked a simple rhetorical question: "Are you targeted by the NSA?" The answer, sadly for those reading this, is very likely yes, as it was revealed that as part of the NSA's XKeyscore program "a computer network exploitation system, as described in an NSA presentation, devoted to gathering nearly everything a user does on the internet" all it takes for a user to be flagged by America's superspooks is to go to a website the NSA finds less than "patriotic" and that user becomes a fixture for the NSA's tracking algos. So assuming one is...

When the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted the online accounts of legally targeted foreigners over a four-year period it also collected the conversations of nine times as many ordinary Internet users, both Americans and non-Americans, according to a probe by The Washington Post. Nearly half of those surveillance files contained names, email addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents, the Post reported in a story posted on its website Saturday night. […] At the same time, the intercepted messages contained material of considerable intelligence value, the Post reported, such as information about...

Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post. Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.

A NSA spying tool is configured to snoop on an array of privacy programs used by journalists and dissidents, according to an analysis of never-before-seen code leaked by an unknown source.The code, published as part of investigation by two German broadcasters on Thursday, contains tracking specifications for XKeyScore, a powerful NSA program that collects and sorts intercepted data.XKeyScore came to light in documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, but some observers believe the latest information -- which adds greater detail on how the agency monitors people trying to protect their privacy online -- may have not come from...

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...