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Leading members of the House Armed Services Committee emerged from a classified briefing on the Edward Snowden leaks this afternoon “shocked” at the amount of information he reportedly leaked beyond the NSA surveillance programs. Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), chairman of the Armed Service panel’s Intelligence, Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee and also a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said the briefing on the defense consequences of Snowden’s leaks was “very highly classified,” and therefore details couldn’t be discussed. …

A Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) has criticised the US government for ignoring guidelines surrounding the National Security Agency's (NSA) Prism programme for domestic surveillance of web users. FISC set out suggested regulations for the Prism programme, which spied on citizens' emails and web use for around 10 years before being shut down in 2011... "NSA exceeded the scope of authorised acquisition continuously during the more than [redacted] years of acquisition under these orders," wrote Judge Bates in a 117 page document. He added that guidelines stated that the government should only gather data on those for whom there was...

<p>Rome — US secret services allegedly eavesdropped on cardinals before the conclave in March to elect a new pope, Italian weekly magazine Panorama claimed Wednesday.</p> <p>"The National Security Agency wiretapped the pope," the magazine said, accusing the United States of listening in to telephone calls to and from the Vatican, including the accommodation housing cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio before he was elected Pope Francis.</p>

Apparently not satisfied with just setting fire to the 4th Amendment, NSA boss Keith Alexander's next target is the 1st Amendment. In an interview with the Defense Department's "Armed With Science" blog , it appears that Alexander felt he'd have a friendly audience, so he let loose with some insane claims, including suggesting that the government needs to find a way to "stop" journalists from reporting on the Snowden leaks . As noted by Politco, General Alexander isn't a fan of journalists doing anything about these documents: "I think it’s wrong that that newspaper reporters have all these documents,...

Hundreds are marching on the National Mall in Washington, DC to protest covert NSA surveillance operations on the anniversary of the Patriot Act. The organizers are planning to present Congress with a petition which has acquired over 570,000 signatures. Stop Watching Us is a collective of 100 public advocacy groups, among them the American Civil Liberties Union, Freedom Works, as well as individuals like Chinese artist/activist Ai Weiwei and Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who worked with Edward Snowden to expose many of the NSAÂ’s surveillance procedures. The rally is scheduled to begin at 11:30 am local time on October...

European leaders united in anger as they attended a summit overshadowed by reports of widespread U.S. spying on its allies.... Angela Merkel said had shattered trust in the Obama adminstration...

PARIS — France and Mexico have angrily demanded prompt explanations from the United States over new spying allegations leaked by former US security contractor Edward Snowden. French daily Le Monde and German weekly Der Spiegel said in separate reports published Monday that the US National Security Agency (NSA) secretly monitored tens of millions of phone communications in France and hacked into former Mexican president Felipe Calderon’s email account. The allegations come on top of revelations already leaked by Snowden and published in June that the US had a vast, secret program called PRISM to monitor Internet users, which French prosecutors...

If a recently leaked document is any indication, the US National Security Agency -- or its UK counterpart -- appears to have put on a Google suit to gather intelligence. CNET got a "no comment" from the NSA in response to our request for more information.

Government and industry have betrayed the internet, and us. By subverting the internet at every level to make it a vast, multi-layered and robust surveillance platform, the NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract. The companies that build and manage our internet infrastructure, the companies that create and sell us our hardware and software, or the companies that host our data: we can no longer trust them to be ethical internet stewards. This is not the internet the world needs, or the internet its creators envisioned. We need to take it back. And by we, I mean the engineering community....

Facebook Inc is considering incorporating most of its 1 billion-plus members’ profile photos into its growing facial recognition database, expanding the scope of the social network’s controversial technology. The possible move, which Facebook revealed in an update to its data use policy on Thursday, is intended to improve the performance of its “Tag Suggest” feature. The feature uses facial recognition technology to speed up the process of labeling or “tagging” friends and acquaintances who appear in photos posted on the network. … The changes would come at a time when Facebook and other Internet companies’ privacy practices are under scrutiny,...

What makes the site incredibly fun to read is its taking on the voice of an NSA that embraces the openness about domestic intelligence gathering brought on by the Snowden leaks. The shadowy, secretive agency finally gets to put its feet up and brag about what it’s doing to “secure the future.” (That, by the way, is the NSA’s real tagline.) The “Surveillance Strategies” section raves about PRISM giving the NSA “ important insights into [targets’] thoughts and intentions.” In a candid explanation about why “Your Data” is being collected, the site explains that it’s “ thanks to top-secret Fourth...

The European Commission will redouble efforts to promote EU-based cloud services this fall—including the urgent drafting of a new charter—amid mounting evidence that the US PRISM spying scandal may damage the global market share of US-based tech companies involved in the cloud computing sector. In June and July 2013, the Cloud Security Alliance, an industry group, surveyed members and other cloud computing stakeholders about their reactions to the US PRISM spying scandal. One in ten of non-US residents responding indicated that they had canceled a project with a US-based cloud computing provider in the wake of PRISM, and 56% said...

The National Security Agency paid millions of dollars to cover the costs of major internet companies involved in the Prism surveillance program after a court ruled that some of the agency's activities were unconstitutional, according to top-secret material passed to the Guardian. The technology companies, which the NSA says includes Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook, incurred the costs to meet new certification demands in the wake of the ruling from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (Fisa) court. The October 2011 judgment, which was declassified on Wednesday by the Obama administration, found that the NSA's inability to separate purely domestic communications from...

According to a declassified order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as of 2011, the US National Security Agency was "acquiring" more than 250 million "internet communications" each year under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) — the statute that allows the NSA to collect the content of internet communications. The order states that the "vast majority" of these communications were obtained from internet service providers under PRISM, and that only nine percent of of the total internet communications acquired by the NSA were part of its "upstream" collection practices, which pull data directly from telecommunications cables. The...

The owner of Lavabit tells us that he's stopped using email and if we knew what he knew, we'd stop too. There is no way to do Groklaw without email. Therein lies the conundrum. What to do? What to do? I've spent the last couple of weeks trying to figure it out. And the conclusion I've reached is that there is no way to continue doing Groklaw, not long term, which is incredibly sad. But it's good to be realistic. And the simple truth is, no matter how good the motives might be for collecting and screening everything we...

The Washington Post´s article detailing the fourth amendment abuses by the NSA got some push back from the administration who attempted to "edit" the article before publication. The internal audit referenced in the article was obtained by the WaPo from Edward Snowden. The details of the audit indicated repeated and growing privacy violations by the NSA, violations which included obtaining thousands of American citizen´s communications records and using methods of information collection that were later deemed unconstitutional by a court. The Post was able to interview John Delong, NSA director of compliance for the article and they were initially

It started innocently enough: Andreas H. Koertel, 46, was pulled over in a traffic stop. Then things got hairy in hurry. Turns out Koertel, a German national, was in possession of meth and illegal weapons, according to the Placer County Sheriff’s Office, so he was booked into jail on multiple charges, KXTV-TV reports. Wisely the deputies called the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department to see if they could check out a property in Rio Linda where Koertel had been staying. But detectives encountered quite a bit more than they bargained for Friday. Here’s what they found, KTXL-TV reports: Several explosive materials,...

In a recent development eerily resembling a combination of both George Orwell’s custodian surveillance-state novel “1984,” and Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged,” in which individuals simply refuse to participate under a corrupt system, a Texas based e-mail provider announced to its customers yesterday that it would terminate operations, rather than “become complicit in crimes against the American people.” The decision was abrupt, and surprised many. Industry insiders are speculating that Lavabit has not provided more details, as contact from the Federal Government may have included a so called, “gag order,” preventing Lavabit’s owner, Ladar Levison, from providing his clients with...

Summary: Revelations of the U.S. government's spying programs could have a massive impact on the U.S. cloud industry, which stands to lose vast sums over the next three years as a result — compounded by other countries bankrolling efforts to combat U.S. market leadership. The U.S.' dominance in the cloud space may soon be challenged by rival countries, particularly those in the European Union, as the global surveillance scandal threatens to wipe up to $35 billion off the U.S. cloud slate. A new report by non-profit group the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation claims that Europeans are attempting to nudge...

In the wake of the recent revelations that America's National Security Agency is spying on all and sundry, is it time for the Linux community to take another good, hard look at the NSA-developed Security Enhanced Linux?The NSA's Security Enhanced Linux comprises a kernel patch to add security features, and patches to applications to allow them to determine the security domain in which to run processes.The code was initially developed by the NSA and is under the GPLv2, the same licence as the kernel. Numerous individuals and companies have made contributions to the project.Recently, Cyanogenmod, one of the more popular...