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(Reuters) - Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who revealed the U.S. government's data collection programs, is now likely under the control of Russian intelligence agencies, according to former NSA Director, General Keith Alexander. Alexander, who retired on March 31, made the comments in an interview with The Australian Financial Review newspaper to be published on Thursday, a transcript of which was made available to Reuters ahead of publication.

Everyone seems to forget that the FBI is the NSA's primary partner in the latter's domestic spying operations and that, in fact, the NSA's job would be impossible without them. Whenever you see a company deny giving any data to the NSA remember: It's because it's not the NSA asking (or demanding) the information of them, it's the FBI.

A few weeks back, I read a Washington Post story "Inside the admissions process at George Washington University" and noted this interesting tidbit towards the end: GW also asks students to list a role model and two words to describe themselves. As for herself, Freitag said, she would list “Martha Stewart/Tina Fey” and “sassy/classy.” This year, she’s seeing a lot of Edward Snowden citations. I had thought about writing it up, but decided it was a pretty small thing, really. It's not secret that, as a group, younger people have a much more favorable impression of Snowden than older people....

Imagine you were in the position of Snowden. As a contractor to the National Security Agency, you knew that your government was monitoring what seemed to be an indefensible amount of electronic communication, from emails, to phone calls, between ordinary Americans. What would you do? Perhaps you would: Resign in protest? Go to the Press with declassified information? Point the Press in the right direction, to ask the right questions? Go public? Other whistleblowers in modern American history, such as Daniel Ellsberg, are today hailed as heroes. Help to start a national conversation about fundamental privacy rights, and the Constitutional...

ON JULY 2 LAST YEAR, the governments of Portugal, France, Italy, and Spain bowed to US orders and refused airspace to the plane carrying Bolivian president Evo Morales. He’d been traveling from Russia to South America until his presidential jet was forced to land in Vienna. Morales and his ministers were stranded there for 15 hours. Acting on bad intelligence or mere suspicions, the higher-ups in the Obama administration, and perhaps President Obama himself, decreed this embarrassing, unprecedented, and illegal detention of a foreign sovereign. The lies fed to Morales and his pilots in Vienna — that there were “technical”...

NSA leaker Edward Snowden asked Russian President Vladimir Putin about whether Russia uses its own mass surveillance system, in a video during a question-and-answer session on Russian television.

On Monday, April 14, 2014, the Pulitzer Prize, the most prestigious award in American journalism, was awarded to the Washington Post and (UK’s) The Guardian for their coverage related to the revelations of spy, Edward Snowden. Apparently, for those on the Pulitzer committee, it’s still ethical to betray your country and carry water for the Russian military and intelligence. Still ethical? Yes. At a press conference held at the Women’s National Republican Club prior to the announcement, Accuracy in Media, a journalistic watchdog based in Washington, D.C., recounted the circumstances around another Pulitzer Prize, to Walter Duranty. Speaking at the...

Damage to U.S. national security caused by NSA contractor Edward Snowden will take decades to repair, the White House official in charge of cyber security said Friday. Snowden’s treachery is especially grave because he exposed how all the parts fit together—the blueprints for how America’s most significant intelligence enterprise actually works—which is also the blueprint for how to defeat it,” she said. “So what does this mean in real terms? It means that the president may not have the intelligence he needs to have for crucial decisions. Nor will the Congress. We may not see threats we should have seen,...

BERLIN--The U.S. National Security Agency allegedly spied on Chinese technology company Huawei Technologies Co. in early 2009 and targeted Chinese officials including former President Hu Jintao, according to German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel. The allegations were contained in pre-released extracts of an article from next week's edition, citing documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Aside from Mr. Hu, other NSA targets in China included the Chinese Trade Ministry, the Foreign Ministry and unidentified banks, Der Spiegel reported. In the extracts, Der Spiegel didn't elaborate on the alleged spying on the officials. Referring to a top-secret NSA presentation,...

The U.S. National Security Agency has infiltrated servers in the headquarters of Chinese telecommunications and internet giant Huawei Technologies Co, obtaining sensitive information and monitoring the communications of top executives, the New York Times reported on Saturday. The newspaper said its report on the operation, code-named "Shotgiant," was based on NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden, the former agency contractor who since last year has leaked data revealing sweeping U.S. surveillance activities. The German magazine Der Spiegel also reported on the documents. One of the goals of the operation was to find any connections between Huawei and the Chinese People's...

Across the world, people who work as system administrators keep computer networks in order – and this has turned them into unwitting targets of the National Security Agency for simply doing their jobs. According to a secret document provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the agency tracks down the private email and Facebook accounts of system administrators (or sys admins, as they are often called), before hacking their computers to gain access to the networks they control.The document consists of several posts – one of them is titled “I hunt sys admins” – that were published in 2012 on an...

This just in from the Edward Snowden vault of government secrets: The National Security Agency is breaking into "potentially millions of computers worldwide" and infecting them with malware "implants" as part of an effort that is increasingly relying on automated systems and not human oversight, according to a by First Look Media report published Wednesday. And the NSA is pretending to be Facebook to get the job done. "In some cases the NSA has masqueraded as a fake Facebook server, using the social-media site as a launching pad to infect a target's computer and exfiltrate files from a hard drive,"...

National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden said today that rather than helping combat terrorism, the U.S. government’s massive surveillance programs have led to “tremendous intelligence failures” and may have contributed to allowing the deadly Boston Marathon bombing to have taken place. “We’re monitoring everybody’s communications, instead of suspects’ communications,” Snowden said during a live video conference at Austin’s popular South by Southwest festival. “That lack of focus has caused us to miss leads that we should’ve had. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the Boston bombers, the Russians had warned us about him… And if we hadn’t spent so much on mass...

WASHINGTON — Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked a trove of documents revealing the agency’s surveillance operations, said he raised his concerns to more than 10 officials, “none of whom took any action to address them,” before he decided to give the documents to journalists. Mr. Snowden’s comments, in written answers to questions by members of the European Parliament that were released on Friday, amplified previous assertions that he initially tried to raise concerns internally about surveillance collection he believed went too far. An N.S.A. spokeswoman declined to comment, but the agency has previously said...

One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It’s time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents. Over the last several weeks, I worked with NBC News to publish a series of articles about “dirty trick” tactics used by GCHQ’s previously secret unit, JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). These were based on four classified GCHQ documents presented to the NSA and the other three partners in...

A senior al-Qaeda figure with close ties to the terrorist group’s current leader has left Iran, where he had lived for years after fleeing American forces in Afghanistan in 2001, according to former and current U.S. intelligence officials. Thirwat Shihata is the latest suspected terrorist to leave Iran, raising questions about the country’s motives for allowing or forcing the departure of a string of al-Qaeda members that it had sheltered over the past decade. A top-secret 2008 U.S. document, which was leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, lists 13 senior al-Qaeda figures or associates in Iran. Five...

Dozens of House lawmakers want the Obama administration to release the secret “black budget” used to fund intelligence agencies. A bipartisan group of 62 members of Congress wrote President Obama a letter on Wednesday asking him to release the fiscal 2015 spending levels for 16 federal spy agencies when he delivers the rest of his budget to Congress on March 4. “The current practice of providing no specificity whatsoever regarding the overall budget requests for each intelligence agency falls woefully short of basic accountability requirements,” the legislators wrote. “As you develop your fiscal year 2015 budget, we strongly urge you...

Last week, a little noticed clash took place on Capitol Hill involving the fundamental values underlying the First Amendment. The issue was the lawfulness of publishing the secrets that were given to reporters by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden. The disputants were Cong. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., and FBI Director James Comey. Rogers is the chief congressional apologist for the massive NSA spying apparatus. He is the current chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and in that capacity, he is one of the dozen members of Congress from both houses who were privy to much...

At the start of this week, documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden detailed DDOS attacks on chatrooms by a British online intelligence unit dubbed the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG). Now he has released a new trove showing that JTRIG is about much more than purely online annoyances.According to the documents, released to NBC News, JTRIG's role is to "deny, disrupt, degrade and deceive" by any means possible. These techniques include destroying an individual's computer with a custom virus dubbed "Ambassador's Reception", setting up social media honey traps to harvest embarrassing information, actively attacking companies online and off, and...

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. …