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WASHINGTON — U.S. sanctions against any country offering asylum to Edward Snowden advanced in Congress Thursday as the 30-year-old National Security Agency leaker remained in a Moscow airport while Russia weighed a request for him to stay permanently. The measure introduced by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., demands the State Department coordinate with lawmakers on setting penalties against nations that seek to help Snowden avoid extradition to the United States, where authorities want him prosecuted for revealing details of the government’s massive surveillance system. The Senate Appropriations Committee approved the proposal unanimously by voice vote as an amendment to next year’s...

You have the right to be secure in your electronic communications. Here's a few tips on how to do it. 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. 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...

In order to collect data about nuclear attacks, you must also collect vast amounts of data that have nothing to do with nuclear attacks. The Cold War with the Soviet Union had to do with more than just nuclear exchanges, and the information on what the Soviets were doing -- what governments they had penetrated, who was working for them -- was a global issue. But you couldn't judge what was important and what was unimportant until after you read it. Thus the mechanics of assuaging fears about a "nuclear Pearl Harbor" rapidly devolved into a global collection system, whereby...

Microsoft has collaborated closely with U.S. intelligence services to allow users' communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company's own encryption, top-secret documents obtained Thursday by the British Guardian show. The files provided by Edward Snowden illustrate the scale of co-operation between Silicon Valley and the intelligence agencies over the last three years. They also shed new light on the workings of the top-secret Prism program, which was disclosed by the Guardian and the Washington Post last month. According to the Guardian, the documents show that: snip

Self-proclaimed civil libertarians are up in arms over the National Security Agency's massive database containing information about whom we call and what we do on the Web. Defenders of the program say, "So what?" Unless you're a terrorist, no one in the government will ever bother to access that information. That's not good enough, say civil libertarians. "At least 850,000 people have security clearances that give them access to this information," Tiffiniy Cheng of Fight for the Future recently wrote on The Huffington Post. "That's the size of Boston. Imagine if they leak information about a politician or business leaders'...

Glenn Snowden, the Guardian reporter who broke the original story about the Obama NSA’s massive spying on U.S. citizens without probable cause, a clear constitutional violation, was interviewed by Eric Bolling on Fox and Friends and indicated that this is just the tip of the iceberg (video below)...

BERLIN -- IN May 2010, I received a brown envelope. It was a CD with an encrypted file containing six months of my life. Six months of metadata, stored by my cellphone provider, T-Mobile. This list of metadata contained 35,83o records. That's 35,830 times my phone company knew if, where and when I was surfing the Web, calling or texting... The metadata of 80 million Germans was being stored, without any concrete suspicions and without cause... In the end, the Constitutional Court [of Germany] ruled that the implementation of the European directive [allowing this] was, in fact, unconstitutional... Given our...

It is way too soon to bet the house fortune on the reliability of reports by the Washington Post (Washington, DC) and The Guardian (United Kingdom) on US President Barack Obama’s data harvesting program, known for the moment as PRISM. With the hot pursuit of mainstream media reporters underway by the US Department of Justice (Associated Press, for example); a US Corporate-State show trial of Bradley Manning, Julian Assange/Wikileaks (Obama has already stated they are guilty); the extraordinary cyberwar/hacking accusations against the Chinese government; and the shrill sound of cyber quackery from the Defense Science Board and its legion of...

EXCERPT ... Snowden said the United States was illegally persecuting him for revealing its electronic surveillance programme, PRISM. He also thanked Ecuador for helping him get to Russia and for examining his asylum request.

The Washington Post has released four previously unpublished slides from the NSA's PowerPoint presentation on Prism, the top-secret programme that collects data on foreign surveillance targets from the systems of nine participating internet companies. The newly published top-secret documents, which the newspaper has released with some redactions, give further details of how Prism interfaces with the nine companies, which include such giants as Google, Microsoft and Apple. According to annotations to the slides by the Washington Post, the new material shows how the FBI "deploys government equipment on private company property to retrieve matching information from a participating company, such...

The Army is blocking all access to The Guardian newspaper's reports about the National Security Agency's sweeping collection of data about Americans' email and phone communications, an Army spokesman said Thursday. The Monterey (Calif.) Herald reported that employees at the Presidio of Monterey, an Army public affairs base about 100 miles south of San Francisco, were unable to gain access to The Guardian's articles on former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and his professed leaks of classified information about the intelligence programs.

The Obama administration allowed the National Security Agency to gather Americans’ Internet information, including emails, until 2011 under a secret program launched by President George W. Bush, according to newly leaked documents. The data collection was first reported by the Guardian newspaper. An official confirmed its existence to the Associated Press. The NSA ended the program that collected email logs and timing, but not content, in 2011 because it did not do what was needed to stop terrorist attacks, according to the NSA's director. Gen. Keith Alexander, who also heads the U.S. Cyber Command, said all data was purged at...

Now sought in the United States on espionage charges, Edward Snowden has reportedly gone from Hong Kong, to Russia, despite requests of extradition by the Obama administration. Many experts have begun to wonder if the Obama administration has squandered the international influence held by the previous administration of George Bush, which managed to unite a coalition of 36 countries during operation Iraqi Freedom...

NSA leaker Edward Snowden admitted to taking a job at Booz Hamilton in order to gather evidence on US spying. Snowden was fired from Booz Allen on June 11. Active content removed Active content removed The South China Morning Post reported: Edward Snowden secured a job with a US government contractor for one reason alone – to obtain evidence of Washington’s cyberspying networks, the South China Morning Post can reveal. For the first time, Snowden has admitted he sought a position at Booz Allen Hamilton so he could collect proof about the US National Security Agency’s secret surveillance programmes ahead...

The metadata-collection program takes money away from efforts that actually save lives.The revelation that the National Security Agency has been secretly amassing data on countless law-abiding American citizens has aroused great concern about the potential threat such an effort poses to liberty. While the program’s defenders assure us that the power the data provide has not been used improperly by those who possess it, one would have to be completely innocent of any knowledge of history or human nature not to predict with absolute certainty that it eventually will be. That this is so goes far toward explaining why those...

From Barack Obama to Karl Rove, the ruling class is in unison: The NSA’s collection of data on virtually all Americans is essential to preventing you from “being blown to smithereens on your morning commute” – as the Wall Street Journal editorial put it. In the words of General Keith Alexander, director of NSA, this surveillance has “helped to prevent” “dozens of terrorist events.” Later, the tally rose to “over fifty.” Project Constant Informant, which tracks essentially all American phone calls, allows matching the account holder’s identity with each call’s precise location in time and place. Another, PRISM, gives access...

In regards to the NSA violations and whistleblower, Edward Snowden, Palin took the opposite opinion of many on the right and left, including former Republican Vice-President, Dick Cheney, who referred to Snowden as a “traitor.” Below is an excerpt from Bolling’s interview with Palin, followed by the video in its entirety...

In a Sunday evening statement, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence Public Affairs Office released this statement, meant to clear up information on the National Security Agency’s data program "The statement that a single analyst can eavesdrop on domestic communications without proper legal authorization is incorrect and was not briefed to Congress. Members have been briefed on the implementation of Section 702, that it targets foreigners located overseas for a valid foreign intelligence purpose, and that it cannot be used to target Americans anywhere in the world," the full statement reads.

Dick Cheney told Fox News that the NSA's PRISM program might have foiled the 9/11 plot. But would it have? Would the NSA's PRISM Have Prevented 9/11? The New American 19 June 2013 Former Vice President Dick Cheney said on Fox News Sunday this week that if the National Security Agency's daily collection of private telephone records and Internet messages had been in place before the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the terrorists' plot might have been foiled. Rep. Mike Rogers (R- Mich.) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairmen, respectively, of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, are among the...

Does it? Should we believe the OMB's numbers that legalizing 15 million illegals will add $179 billion dollars to the U.S. economy over the next 10 years, and $700 billion over the next 10 years after that? Should we believe Menendez? How accurate was the Office of Management and Budget on what OBAMACARE would cost? I would like to see how much faith Rubio, McCain, Graham and others - be they conservative hosts on television or on talk radio - put in the numbers that the OMB supplied concerning legalizing 15 million illegals. Should they believe Menendez? The New York...