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The German government is demanding explanations from the US after it emerged that its secret spying program PRISM collected more information from Germany than any other EU country. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is expected to raise the issue when she receives US President Barack Obama in Berlin next week, her spokesman said on Monday (10 June). Data privacy is a very sensitive topic in Germany and the cluelessness of Merkel’s government about the affair may become an issue in September’s elections. … Germany’s hawkish interior minister—a Bavarian Christian-Social politician whose party is standing for re-election both on regional and national...

(FULL TITLE: "'I'm neither a traitor nor a hero... I'm an American': NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden finally breaks cover - and vows to expose MORE secrets") Newspaper said he has exposed more details about surveillance targets He said he will remain in Hong Kong and fight any extradition bidSnowden's whereabouts in Hong Kong are still unknown Edward Snowden, the former CIA analyst behind one of the most significant government leaks in U.S. history, has vowed to expose further surveillance secrets as he speaks out again. The 29-year-old whistleblower remained defiant in an interview with the South China Morning Post on...

Stung by criticism of their role in newly revealed government surveillance programs, Google (GOOG) and other leading Internet companies responded Tuesday by calling on federal authorities to let them tell the public more about the National Security Agency's secret efforts to gather data on Internet users. The new response from Google, Facebook and Microsoft came as a coalition of civil liberties groups urged Congress to conduct a broad investigation of the government's data-gathering, the ACLU filed a lawsuit challenging a separate surveillance program involving phone records and a poll showed that Americans are sharply divided over whether such surveillance is...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Lawmakers voiced their confusion and concern over the sweeping secret surveillance programs revealed recently, after receiving an unusual briefing on the government's yearslong collection of phone records and Internet usage. "People aren't satisfied," Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., said as he left the briefing Tuesday. "More detail needs to come out." -- Some congressmen acknowledged they'd been caught unawares by the scope of the programs, having skipped previous briefings by the intelligence committees. "I think Congress has really found itself a little bit asleep at the wheel," Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., said. Many leaving the forum declared themselves...

The LA Times reports that sales of the book, which concerns a discontented propagandist working for the Ministry of Truth in a time of endless war, are up 5,771 percent as of Tuesday morning. From a sales rank of 12,507 in the days before The Guardian published top-secret government documents provided by Snowden, "1984" has risen to crack Amazon's top 200.

German outrage over a U.S. Internet spying program has broken out ahead of a visit by Barack Obama, with ministers demanding the president provide a full explanation when he lands in Berlin next week and one official likening the tactics to those of the East German Stasi. German Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman has said she will raise the issue with Obama in talks next Wednesday, potentially casting a cloud over a visit that was designed to celebrate U.S.-German ties on the 50th anniversary John F. Kennedy's famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech... In a guest editorial for Spiegel Online on...

Update: Data-mining goes deeper than thought? It’s not just the number of requests, it’s the scope of them. They’re not demanding records related to particular investigations anymore, they’re demanding huge troves of records on random Americans for data-mining purposes, the same thing Patriot Act co-author Jim Sensenbrenner complained about a few days ago but somehow didn’t foresee in 2001.

We know this White House doesn’t think much of the Second Amendment, it has reservations about the First. When these amendments are pushed aside, the rest of us won’t have anything left. We’ll wonder how it happened. President Obama insists that nobody at the National Security Agency is listening to anybody’s telephone calls. That may be true. Not unless they have to listen, anyway. But “aggregated metadata,” collected and analyzed by computer technology, is more revealing than content. Two NSA whistleblowers, J. Kirk Wiebe and Billy Binney, told Megyn Kelly of Fox News how it works. When the government’s computers...

The FBI has dramatically increased its use of a controversial provision of the Patriot Act to secretly obtain a vast store of business records of U.S. citizens under President Barack Obama, according to recent Justice Department reports to Congress. The bureau filed 212 requests for such data to a national security court last year – a 1,000-percent increase from the number of such requests four years earlier, the reports show. The FBI’s increased use of the Patriot Act’s “business records” provision — and the wide ranging scope of its requests -- is getting new

A best-selling author and technology expert has said that web users should boycott internet giants like Google and Facebook if it is confirmed they were involved in a US surveillance programme referred to as Prism. In an interview with Wired.co.uk, Professor Tim Wu of Columbia Law School suggested that consumers had a responsibility to leave social networks found out to be collaborating secretly with intelligence services such as the US National Security Agency: "Quit Facebook and use another search engine. It's simple." He added, "It's nice to keep in touch with your friends. But I think if you find out...

On Special Report with Bret Baier, a video of Joe Biden from May 12, 2006 was discussed. In this video, Biden told us to not trust a president who spys.

Some are using the founders to justify the current NSA programs, but Mark Levin, in an excellent monologue, disagrees and sets the record straight on what the founders actually thought about search and seizure as they drafted and argued over the Constitution.

Former Justice Department prosecutor Larry Klayman amended an existing lawsuit against Verizon and a slew of Obama administration officials Monday to make it the first class-action lawsuit in response to the publication of a secret court order instructing Verizon to hand over the phone records of millions of American customers on an "ongoing, daily basis." Klayman told U.S. News he will file a second class-action lawsuit Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia targeting government officials and each of the nine companies listed in a leaked National Security Agency slideshow as participants in the government's PRISM...

The Legacy Lives On! Mark’s Lost Dog & Cat Rescue Foundation “Conservatism is the antidote to tyranny precisely because its principles are the founding principles.” --Mark Levin in Liberty and TyrannyWelcome to “The Levin Lounge”… Step in and have a virtual FRink.Taking the country by storm, one radio station at a time – and kicking the BUTTS of the competition… it’s America’s Clean-Up Hitter! Welcome all, to the most FUN LIVE THREAD on FreeRepublic.com! You can call Mark’s show: 1-877-381-3811

This puts quite a different spin on last week’s question about possible perjury by the Director of National Intelligence after the exposure of the NSA’s PRISM and BLARNEY programs, doesn’t it? While we didn’t necessarily assume that Senator Ron Wyden’s question came out of the blue to James Clapper in March – Wyden has long professed public concern about the NSA and its activities — we didn’t know that Wyden had in fact warned Clapper a full day in advance that it would be asked. Not only that, but Wyden also offered Clapper an opportunity to amend the answer for...

Edward Snowden : Patriot or Traitor ? Patriot ? Traitor ? Somewhere in between ?

FYI....Verizon's Privacy Policy regarding information shared outside of the Verizon Family of Companies.

A couple in Philadelphia has filed a class-action lawsuit against the National Security Agency and Verizon, claiming they and their phone records were targeted for surveillance because of their outspoken criticism of Barack Obama and the U.S. military. This is believed to be the first official lawsuit filed against the government and the company, since it was revealed that Verizon had been ordered to turn over phone metadata for all of its customers. The couple who filed the class-action suit are not just any disgruntled Verizon customers, however. They are Charles and Mary Ann Strange, the parents of a Navy...

PC World - Thursday afternoon, a bombshell dropped: Two leading reports claimed that the U.S. government has been spying on emails, searches, Skype calls, and other electronic communications used by Americans for the last several years, via a program known as PRISM. [ALSO: Prism leaker steps forward] According to the reports, the Web's largest names--AOL, Apple, Facebook,A Google, Microsoft, Skype, PalTalk, Yahoo, and YouTube--participated, perhaps unwittingly. (Dropbox will reportedly be added as well.) The report claims that the National Security Agency had "direct access" to servers owned by those companies. Most, if not all, of those companies have denied participating...

George Takei is hardly the only American concerned about the NSA's massive surveillance programs. But unlike most people, his fears are rooted in the memory of the government persecution he suffered firsthand in a Japanese internment camp. "Due process is a pillar of our American justice system," the Star Trek star told Daily Intelligencer last night at the Eighth Annual Stella by Starlight Benefit Gala. "We were rounded up simply because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. And we were put in prison camps with barbed wire and machine guns pointed at us. It was...