Google has filed a motion to end the gag order on the secret FISA court requests that it gets from the government as a part of the National Security Agencies surveillance, which could work considering how recent efforts to reveal the secrets of the secret court have gone.
If you were wondering how the NSA and FBI felt about the very friendly hearing the House Intelligence Committee invited them to today, a hot mic has your answer. "Tell your boss," NSA Director Keith Alexander told the FBI deputy director, "I owe him another friggin' beer."
North Korea, land of gulags, government-enforced information blackouts, and humans so hungry they eat other humans, has finally weighed in on the NSA-spying controversy and has become ... an advocate for American civil liberties.
Of the nine companies supposedly working with the government on PRISM, four and a half — Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft (which may or may not include Skype), Apple, and Google (sort of) — have disclosed the number of government requests they get including the secret FISA court ones, giving us an idea of which tech company the government loves most.
The House Intelligence Committee invited Gen. Keith Alexander, Director of the NSA, for a discussion of his agency's surveillance tactics. Four disrupted plots were detailed. But on the whole, the one-sided hearing belied the witnesses' frequent claims that the NSA receives robust oversight from Congress.
President Obama "goes further than he has before" in explaining "the balance between security and freedom," the Charlie Rose Show tweeted to hype its 45-minute interview that airs Monday night. And while a leaked transcript shows Obama does go into further detail than he has before, we've already heard most of these defenses. This is what they sound like this week.
It is possible that Edward Snowden is a Chinese spy, as Dick Cheney might have you believe. If he is, Snowden is one of the most capable and least predictable spies in American history. A cursory look at the evidence at hand suggests that Cheney is wrong.
In its second official statement on the matter, Apple has clarified its relationship with the U.S. government claiming that at least FaceTime and iMessages are safe from the National Security Agency's prying eyes, due to super-encryption.
In order to figure out if we are striking the right balance between freedom and security, it helps to know what's on both sides of the scale. But when it comes to the National Security Agency's domestic and Internet surveillance program, even after all of Edward Snowden's leaks, we don't actually know very much at all.
Following a week of incredibly bad press some sources have leaked some very dubious "talks" between the National Security Administration and Facebook about allowing more transparency and disclosure with government data requests.
We knew Snowden had new information about hacking, but new reports today suggest that he has targets — and that they may affect diplomatic relations as the leaker seeks to put off extradition back home.
In a move as fiendishly clever as it is galling, Microsoft tells the U.S. government about bugs in its notoriously buggy software before it fixes them so that intelligence agencies can use the vulnerabilities for the purposes of cyberspying. And that's just one of the new revelations that the tech world is in bed espionage agencies.
What FBI head Robert Mueller and the NSA really need this week is simple. They need a terror attack they can point to and say: "Our surveillance tools, the ones everyone is complaining about, stopped that." They're still looking.
Tea Partiers have long had a hunch that President Obama was a tyrant smugly unrestrained by the Constitution, but now they have proof!
NSA director General Keith Alexander spent some time explaining the necessity of the NSA's surveillance programs on Wednesday. And while the director's answers at to the assembled lawmakers were low on specifics, it seemed to boil down to two implied words: trust me. Here's what else we know about him.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation scored a remarkable — and remarkably timely — legal victory on Wednesday. The secret court at the center of the recent NSA surveillance revelations allowed the group's push for the release of a ruling on violations of Americans' Fourth Amendment rights to move forward.
"Nobody's listening to the content of people's phone calls," President Obama says. But it doesn't matter. The government doesn't need to listen to your calls. Because it already knows where you are, and that does matter.
Officials say National Security Agency intercepts stopped David Coleman Headley's planned attack in Denmark, but sources say a tip from the British led to his capture after the U.S. failed for years to connect multiple reports of terror ties.
Edward Snowden was not the first high-profile person to reveal secrets about the NSA's surveillance operations after September 11th. He was the third. The first two have come forward to express support for Snowden, in part, one can assume, hoping that this time something actually changes.
Intelligence officials are in the middle of their all-out public relations campaign following revelations that the NSA collects all phone call metadata and most of the Internet. Their rousing defense of the surveillance programs, which will continue Wednesday afternoon, suggests intelligence officials would benefit from a public debate, because they would be forced to hear people explain how ridiculous they sound.
Google has now clarified exactly the kind of access the National Security Agency has to its servers. But how does it really work, will this revelation make anyone feel better about the very privacy and transparency Google is pushing for? We explain.
Americans are weighing in on how they want the Supreme Court to rule on upcoming cases dealing with affirmative action and gay marriage, and eventually some court to decide the new NSA spying suits. Their opinions — against, for, and mixed, respectively — are, of course, irrelevant to what the courts do.
Looks like surveillance defenders just lost their main talking point in defense of the NSA's (formerly) secret phone and data tracking programs: Najibullah Zazi, the would-be New York City subway bomber, could have easily been caught without PRISM.
The American Civil Liberties Union has filed suit against the NSA and others following confirmation its access of Verizon data. This might represent the first strong threat to the NSA's surveillance system — and it's not even the only push brought by civil liberties groups on Tuesday.
It's pretty lonely to be the National Security Agency right now. But one of the other most liberal senators in Congress is so far speaking out in NSA's support.
Public officials are rarely called liars these days, even when they lie blatantly, but the ideological odd couple of Slate's Fred Kaplan and Charles Cooke of the National Review are both using the L word to call out Director of National Intelligence James Clapper for deceiving the public about the extent of the NSA's data gathering.
"I welcome this debate," President Obama said of the NSA revelations. But with swaths of the security state still shrouded by classification, open debate is hard to come by. Which is why a group of senators introduced a bill Tuesday to expose at least one element of those measures to a little more openness. Will it work? Can anything? That might come down to the word "terrorist."
A couple in Philadelphia has filed a class-action lawsuit against the NSA and Verizon, claiming they and their phone records were targeted for surveillance because of their outspoken criticism of Barack Obama and the U.S. military. Indeed, these aren't just any disgruntled Verizon customers.
There is a lot of fan fiction swirling around right now about Edward Snowden, the man who leaked the NSA's programs to collect all phone calls and all email.
Government IT contractor Booz Allen has updated its official statement on employee Edward Snowden to let everyone know — in case it wasn't obvious enough — that he doesn't work there anymore.
Now that Edward Snowden is on the lam, location unknown, the curious have tracked down the NSA whistleblower's family, friends, and (possible) girlfriend to learn more.
A bit of good news for the 265 sitting members of Congress who voted to extend the PATRIOT Act: 56 percent of Americans thinks doing just that is just fine. As a majority also did seven years ago.
It wasn't even 24 hours since Edward Snowden revealed himself as the NSA surveillance leaker — but that was plenty of time for everyone to decide whether he's a good guy or a contemptible monster.
Edward Snowden is the most sought-after leaker of national security secrets on Earth right now, but it appears that nobody has any idea where he actually is. The 29-year-old former defense contractor has gone AWOL, and the chase is on, for sleuths both real and amateur.
Most members of Congress are not outraged by the NSA's programs to collect all your phone calls and emails. They're outraged that someone would expose them. Now that the leaker has gone public — Edward Snowden is still holed up somewhere in Hong Kong, with "way, way more" secrets — the campaign to discredit him as a nutcase has begun.
From Washington to Hong Kong and back again, a lot of people are saying Snowden made a mistake in picking his hideout. But what are the Chinese papers saying about their 29-year-old Deep Throat in residence? And do they have any more news on his extradition? Also: Where is this guy anyway?
Do you like computers, love Hawaii, and would thrill at the opportunity to access our government's most highly classified secrets? Then Booz Allen Hamilton has the job for you!
After a series of stunning reports from the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald on the NSA's data collection programs, the paper will no doubt remain a central figure in the story of Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who leaked the PRISM slides in the first place. But, according to one of the reporters by-lined on the Washington Post's PRISM story, the exclusive was theirs to lose.
What happens next with the man responsible for leaking a trove of National Security Agency documents to the Guardian rests in the hands of two countries who could decide to send him back to the U.S. with express shipping, or to keep him as a global bargaining chip.
New reports released Saturday morning reveal Facebook and Google were telling something resembling the truth when they denied the NSA has "direct access" to their servers, and that the government doesn't, in fact, have direct access to these massive personal information treasures storing most of our modern day-to-day communications.
This week's revelations about the National Security Agency's hyperactive interest in seeing what's happening online probably inspired you to wonder how much that privilege is costing you.
Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg went on record giving nearly the exact same denials of involvement with the NSA — one of the many questionable aspects of their remarks.
There is a split among conservatives between those who think the NSA's collection of data about every phone call in America is an important counterterrorism tool, and those who think President Obama is, as usual, trampling on the constitution and the flag and the Founding Fathers. But Rush Limbaugh takes it one step further. He says Obama is leading a coup d'etat. And this time it's for real.
After two-and-a-half dizzying days of revelations about NSA surveillance, President Obama offered an assurance: "[W]ith respect to the Internet and emails," he said, "this does not apply to U.S. citizens, and it does not apply to people living in the United States." Which depends heavily on how you define "apply." So we spoke with some people and did a little poking around to figure out how much you might need to worry about the government accessing your private information.
On a Friday full of tech-land denials and government distancing and no real answers about how the NRA's sweeping spy program actually works, Palanatir — the "Mysterious Silicon Valley Company Helping the NSA Spy on Americans" — now insists that its own "Prism" system for database mining has nothing to do with the NSA's "PRISM" data-mining program, but that's not going to calm many privacy fears, either.
President Obama defended the National Security Agency's collection of all our phone calls on Friday by saying at a press briefing that if the agency was acting like "Big Brother and how this is a potential program run amok," then Congress would be free to air those concerns. This is not true.
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