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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 …

As an IT professional I am calling BS on the claim that Lerner's emails are lost. The BHO regime has choosen to gleem the cube on this one and it is going to bite them in the a$$! I think it is time Ed Snowden is asked to apply his skills and retrieve the files in question. I have no doubt he is the man for the job.

Full Title: Edward Snowden was in Moscow's sights six years before leaking U.S. secrets claims former KGB agent/// Moscow identified Edward Snowden as a possible defector in 2007 Former KGB chief Boris Karpichkov said Moscow 'tricked' Snowden Russians began monitoring Snowden, 30, in Geneva while at the CIA US officials trying to establish whether Snowden as a double agent Russian spies 'tricked' US whistleblower Edward Snowden into asking Moscow for asylum by posing as diplomats after spending six years targeting him, a former major in the KGB has claimed. Boris Karpichkov, who fled Russia after 15 years serving with the...

There is no shortage of people who will speak out against Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the only American prisoner of the Afghanistan war, just released from five years of capture. One is Justin Gerleve, Bergdahl's former squad leader, who appeared on CNN on Wednesday. "I believe that he totally deserted—not only his fellow soldiers—but his leadership that wanted the best for him and for our country," Gerleve said. He also implied that Bergdahl's capture led to an increase in targeted attacks against their units. (There are disputed claims over whether several died as a direct result of Bergdahl's actions.) "I can't...

This is Secretary of State John Kerry’s answer.... “He should man up, come back to the United States. If he has a complaint about what’s wrong with American surveillance, come back here and stand in our system of justice and make his case....” The argument has a specious attractiveness; however, its premises are arbitrary, its logic shaky, and its implications pernicious. ...It is true that some disobedients, such as Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Rosa Parks, did not seek to evade punishment. It is also true, however, that they could not possibly have done so, for...

Ten years before Edward Snowden revealed his bombshell that the United States government was electronically spying on people on a massive scale there was Bay Area-resident Mark Klein. Nannett Miranda reports. Ten years before Edward Snowden revealed his bombshell that the United States government was electronically spying on people on a massive scale there was Bay Area resident Mark Klein. As a San Francisco-based AT&T technician in 2003, he installed a splitter that sent a copy of communications data to a secret room set up by the NSA in his South of Market office building. "I knew right away that...

During a round of morning interviews with several of the major television networks on Wednesday, Secretary of State John Kerry accused NSA [National Security Agency] leaker Edward Snowden of engaging in the same kind of betrayal and traitorous activities that Kerry once participated in. When Kerry returned from the Vietnam War in the early 70's, he accused his fellow American soldiers of committing war crimes. Kerry's accusations provoked the ire of countless Vietnam War vets who said that not only was Kerry falsely maligning them, but that he was guilty of betrayal and that he was harming American POW's in...

Video:New reporting seems to confirm government leaker Edward Snowden’s claim that he tried to bring his concerns up the chain of command before leaking top-secret documents to the press. “I actually did go through channels, and that is documented,” he told NBC in an interview on Wednesday evening. “The NSA [National Security Agency] has records, they have copies of emails right now to their Office of General Counsel, to their oversight and compliance folks, from me raising concerns about the NSA’s interpretations of its legal authorities.”[snip]n the April 5, 2013, email, he questioned the spy agency’s legal rationale for snooping...

Edward Snowden Describes When The CIA Got A Swiss Banker Drunk The former NSA/CIA employee who leaked documents about several invasive government spying programs, Edward Snowden has had growing doubts about the government for a long time, according to a interview in the Guardian. One "formative" incident occurred around 2007, when the young technical analyst was working for the CIA under diplomatic cover in Geneva, Switzerland. It involved a Swiss banker, as described in the Guardian: CIA operatives were attempting to recruit a Swiss banker to obtain secret banking information. Snowden said they achieved this by purposely getting the banker...

Thanks to Edward Snowden, we know the apparatus of repression has been covertly attached to the democratic state. However, our struggle to retain privacy is far from hopeless.

Glenn Greenwald, one of the reporters who chronicled the document dump by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden via the U.K. press, now said he’s set to publish his most dramatic piece yet: The names of those in the United States targeted by the NSA. “One of the big questions when is comes to domestic spying is, ‘Who have been the NSA’s specific targets?’ Are they political critics and dissidents and activists? Are they genuinely people we’d regard as terrorists? What are the metrics and calculations that go into choosing those targets and what is done with the surveillance that...

Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who helped NSA leaker Edward Snowden expose state secrets to the world, is set to make his “biggest” disclosure yet — the names of Americans the government spied on, he told The Sunday Times.Greenwald added that Snowden’s legacy will be “shaped in large part” by this “finishing piece,” which is based on information obtained in the nearly 2 million documents the former NSA contractor secretly stole from the government.

Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday called National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden a fugitive and challenged him to "man up and come back to the United States." Kerry was asked about Snowden in a nationally broadcast interview in the wake of an interview in which Snowden said he never intended to be holed up in Russia but was forced to go there because Washington decided to "revoke my passport." Asked about this, Kerry replied on NBC's "Today" show: "Well, for a supposedly smart guy, that's a pretty dumb answer, after all."

Edward J. Snowden says he was not merely a “low-level analyst” writing computer code for American spies, as President Obama and other administration officials have portrayed him. Instead, he says, he was a trained spy who worked under assumed names overseas for the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. “I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word in that I lived and worked undercover overseas — pretending to work in a job that I’m not — and even being assigned a name that was not mine,” Mr. Snowden told Brian Williams...

Former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked details of massive U.S. intelligence-gathering programs, said in a U.S. TV interview he "was trained as a spy" and had worked undercover overseas for U.S. government agencies. In an advance excerpt of his interview in Moscow with "NBC Nightly News" that aired on Tuesday, Snowden rejected comments by critics that he was a low-level analyst. "Well, it's no secret that the U.S. tends to get more and better intelligence out of computers nowadays than they do out of people," Snowden told NBC news anchor Brian Williams. "I was trained as a...

BEIJING -- A Chinese Internet information body has complained of "unscrupulous" surveillance by U.S. intelligence agencies over the rest of the world, and called for an immediate cessation of the practice. A report by China's Internet Media Research Center published on Monday said the U.S. has taken advantage of its political, economic, military and technological hegemony to spy without restraint on other countries, including its allies. The operations have gone "far beyond the legal rationale of 'anti-terrorism' and have exposed the ugly face of its pursuit of self-interest in complete disregard for moral integrity," the report read. It added that...

The National Security Agency is secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas. According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the surveillance is part of a top-secret system – code-named SOMALGET – that was implemented without the knowledge or consent of the Bahamian government. Instead, the agency appears to have used access legally obtained in cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to open a backdoor to the country’s cellular telephone network, enabling it to covertly record and store the “full-take audio” of every mobile call...

<p>I will take credit for being one of the first to point out the fact that Snowden’s whistleblower narrative was a total crock because after the initial flurry his leaks had little to do with NSA surveillance of individuals, but instead revealed information that was highly damaging to US national security and foreign policy. The only question in my mind was when he was when he became a Russian asset. I still don’t know, but as I also pointed out a while ago, the fact that collected disproportionately such national security-related information made it very plausible that he was tasked to collect this information, and given the identity of the ultimate beneficiary-Russia-it was also plausible that he was Russia’s witting or unwitting tool from the get go.</p>

Those who know the files he stole think he was working for a foreign power, perhaps Russia, where he now lives. -excerpt- The vast majority of those [stolen documents] were related to our military capabilities, operations, tactics, techniques and procedures. ...the media and Mr. Snowden's admirers have only his word as to what went on. His detractors are the people who know enough about what happened to conclude that far from being a whistleblower, Mr. Snowden was a participant in an espionage operation...

(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.