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The secret court that oversees the nation’s intelligence activities renewed its approval of the National Security Agency’s telephone-records program on Friday, granting the government a new three-month window to collect data on all Americans’ phone calls. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s office announced the court’s ruling in a statement, though officials didn’t make the ruling itself public, saying it was going through declassification procedures. The decision marks the 36th time the program has been approved by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. “It is the administration’s view, consistent with the recent holdings of the United States District Courts for...

Leaked documents now show what we all suspected: the NSA can turn your iPhone’s microphone and camera on and off without you knowing. According to Der Spiegel’s website: “The NSA’s ANT division develops implants for mobile phones and SIM cards. One of these is a spyware implant called “DROPOUTJEEP” — designed for the first generation of iPhones — which was still in development in 2008, shortly after the iPhone’s launch. This spyware was to make it possible to remotely download or upload files to a mobile phone. It would also, according to the catalog, allow the NSA to divert text...

A federal judge in New York on Friday ruled that the National Security Agency’s program that is systematically keeping phone records of all Americans is lawful, creating a conflict among lower courts and increasing the likelihood that the issue will be resolved by the Supreme Court. In the ruling, Judge William H. Pauley III, of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, granted a motion filed by the federal government to dismiss a challenge to the program brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, which had tried to halt the program. Judge Pauley said that...

Today, a judge ruled that the NSA surveillance program that collects millions of American's phone calls is "lawful." The case was brought by the ACLU: American Civil Liberties Union et al v. Clapper et al, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 13-03994 In his ruling, U.S District Judge Willian Pauley described how the government program "vacuums up information about virtually every telephone call to, from, or within the United States." But went on to say that the program's constitutionality "is ultimately a question of reasonableness," and that there was no evidence that the government had used "bulk...

... Hi, and merry Christmas. I’m honored to have a chance to speak to you and your family this year. Recently, we learned that our governments, working in concert, have created a system of worldwide mass surveillance watching everything we do. Great Britain’s George Orwell warned us of the danger of this kind of information. The types of collection in the book: microphones, video cameras, TVs that watch us —are nothing compared to what we have today. We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go. Think about what that means for the privacy of the average...

The NSA and RSA have reported to have made a deal. In exchange for "back door privileges" the NSA paid RSA $10M. Thanks in a large part to Snowden, we now know that this story is true, particularly when you read the carefully crafted statement from the RSA denying they sold a back door to the NSA -- They just happened to accept $10M from the NSA at the time they were selecting a known faulty and broken random number generator used in encryption. Now we've all read about the global fallout and protestations from foreign governments saying how upset...

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will ask US President Barack Obama to commute the life sentence of convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard at a critical stage of the diplomatic talks with the Palestinian Authority, Channel 2 diplomatic correspondent Udi Segal reported Monday night. Netanyahu had tied Pollard’s release to talks with the Palestinians in the past. He reached a deal with former US president Bill Clinton to commute Pollard’s sentence in 1998 as part of the Wye River Accord, but Clinton reneged on the deal after then-CIA director George Tenet threatened to quit. The prime minister reportedly asked the US for...

NSA Spying: The diplomat who blamed four American deaths in Benghazi on a video claims the denials by the director of national intelligence of blanket surveillance of Americans were inadvertent false representations. It might have been slightly more credible had Pajama Boy appeared on CBS' "60 Minutes" broadcast on Sunday instead of Susan Rice. The current national security adviser and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations participated in a puff piece that might have been an episode of, "Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?" For viewers, it was deja vu all over again. Rice went on five Sunday...

“Almost Orwellian” -- that’s the description a federal judge gave earlier this week to the massive spying by the National Security Agency (NSA) on virtually all 380 million cellphones in the United States. In the first meaningful and jurisdictionally grounded judicial review of the NSA cellphone spying program, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee sitting in Washington, D.C., ruled that the scheme of asking a secret judge on a secret court for a general warrant to spy on all American cellphone users without providing evidence of probable cause of criminal behavior against any of them...

"I envy Obama because he can spy on his allies without any consequences," said Putin when asked about how his relations had changed with the US following Snowden’s espionage revelations. During an annual question-and-answer session with journalists, Putin praised Edward Snowden’s actions, saying that he was working for a “noble cause.” At the same time he accepted the importance of espionage programs in the fight against global terrorism, but said the NSA needed guidelines to limit its powers. “There is nothing to be upset about and nothing to be proud of, spying has always been and is one of the...

The president’s hand-picked intelligence review panel has submitted a list of recommendations that would politicize the leadership and the routine operations of the nation’s leading military intelligence agency. The 46 recommendations urge the federal government to treat foreign enemies as courtroom-protected citizens, and to would require the soldiers working at the National Security Agency to negotiate day-to-day decisions with an array of private-sector lawyers. President Barack Obama met Wednesday with his five appointees on the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, whose report was released late Wednesday afternoon. Obama is expected to announce his preferred policies next month, but...

President Obama met with top technology industry executives on Tuesday to discuss two seemingly distinct controversies: a faulty health care website and the digital surveillance practices of the National Security Agency, Jackie Calmes and Nick Wingfield report. The meeting started with an announcement by Mr. Obama that he was reaching into the ranks of Microsoft, the software giant, to select Kurt DelBene as the next person to run HealthCare.gov. But the focus quickly turned from the health care site to the concerns of Apple, Microsoft, Google and other technology companies about the spying efforts, the latest illustration of the strained...

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden wrote in a lengthy "open letter to the people of Brazil" that he's been inspired by the global debate ignited by his release of thousands of National Security Agency documents, and that the NSA's culture of indiscriminate global espionage "is collapsing."

A federal judge said Monday that he believes the government’s once-secret collection of domestic phone records is unconstitutional, setting up likely appeals and further challenges to the data mining revealed by classified leaker Edward Snowden. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon said the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of metadata — phone records of the time and numbers called without any disclosure of content — apparently violates privacy rights.

The U.S. Government, An Implicated Billionaire, Fortune-Seeking Journalists & A Public in the Dark Update 2: Glenn Greenwald Goes on Record: “I Don’t Doubt PayPal Cooperates with NSA!” Update 1: Verbatim Copy of Mr. Binney’s Statement The 50,000-pages of documents obtained by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden contain extensive documentation of PayPal Corporation’s partnership and cooperation with the National Security Agency (NSA), according to three NSA veterans. To date, no information has been released as to the extent of the working relationship and cooperation between the two entities- NSA and PayPal Corporation. What’s more, the billionaire owner of PayPal Corporation has...

The University of the Incarnate Word is a highly-rated Catholic college in San Antonio, Texas. It is hardly a hot bed of campus violence. When senior Robert Cameron Redus was pulled-over last Friday by campus police for “erratically speeding,” it is unlikely he had any clue of how tragically the stop would end. The campus police department contends Redus, an honors student set to graduate in May, grabbed the officer’s steel baton during a struggle. Not in dispute, however, is that Redus was shot five times by the officer, at close range, leaving him dead and the University scrambling to...

Giving a new twist to the term "spy games," U.S. and British intelligence agents have infiltrated the World of Warcraft and Second Life online fantasy games in their search for terrorists and criminal networks. The spy agencies "have built mass-collection capabilities against the Xbox Live console network, which has more than 48 million players," James Ball reported in The Guardian. He based his account on classified papers leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, whose release of masses of documents detailing U.S. communications surveillance has made him a finalist for Time's Person of the Year. Spies took on...

Obama's National Intelligence Director, James Clapper, blatantly lied to Congress last Spring when in response to a question stated the NSA does not "not wittingly" collect information on Americans in bulk. The lie was revealed thanks to American hero and true patriot, Edward Snowden. Proven a liar, Clapper now freely admits he gave the "least untruthful" answer he could without revealing classified information. The Hill reports Patriot Act author says "Obama’s intel czar should be prosecuted" Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr., the original author of the Patriot Act, says Director of National Intelligence James Clapper should be prosecuted for lying to...

MNSure, the state's health care exchange, is vulnerable to a specific kind of WiFi attack. We discovered this vulnerability during a simulated attack we ran recently. MNSure denies it has a problem and blames users. 5 Eyewitness News wanted to see how MNSure compares with other state-run health care exchanges. It's why we partnered with Mark Lanterman at Computer Forensic Services to test at least a dozen other exchange sites. More than 41% of the sites tested passed, meaning they are not vulnerable to the type of WiFi attack we simulated. Like MNSure, more than 58% failed the test

Microsoft is moving toward a major new effort to encrypt its Internet traffic amid fears that the National Security Agency may have broken into its global communications links, said people familiar with the emerging plans. Suspicions at Microsoft, while building for several months, sharpened in October when it was reported that the NSA was intercepting traffic inside the private networks of Google and Yahoo, two industry rivals with similar global infrastructures, said people with direct knowledge of the company’s deliberations. They said top Microsoft executives are meeting this week to decide what encryption initiatives to deploy and how quickly.