David Miranda—partner of The Guardian's lead NSA-leaks reporter Glenn Greenwald—was detained under local terrorism laws for nearly nine hours on Sunday at London's Heathrow airport. Miranda was eventually released without any charges, but authorities confiscated property such as Miranda's phone, laptop, camera, memory sticks, DVDs, and games consoles, according to The Guardian.
A report published Thursday evening in The Washington Post highlights top-secret documents that show the National Security Agency (NSA) collects unauthorized surveillance on Americans thousands of times per year.
The USA's National Security Agency (NSA) has issued a document titled ( The National Security Agency: Missions, Authorities, Oversight and Partnerships(PDF) that explains some of its operations and includes a claim it “... touches about 1.6%... “ of daily Internet traffic and “...only 0.025% is actually selected for review.”
The National Security Agency, hit by disclosures of classified data by former contractor Edward Snowden, said Thursday it intends to eliminate about 90 percent of its system administrators to reduce the number of people with access to secret information.
Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, the U.S. spy agency charged with monitoring foreign electronic communications, told a cybersecurity conference in New York City that automating much of the work would improve security.
"We knew USG would come after us”. That’s why Silent Circle CEO Michael Janke tells TechCrunch his company shut down its Silent Mail encrypted email service. It hadn’t been told to provide data to the government, but after Lavabit shut down today rather than be “complicit” with NSA spying, Silent Circle told customers it has killed off Silent Mail rather than risk their privacy.
Once it became clear that he was going to be trapped in Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport for a while, National Security Agency (NSA) leaker Edward Snowden chose to end his isolation by inviting several human rights activists to meet with him in July. The e-mails Snowden sent out to organize that meeting reportedly came from the e-mail address "edsnowden@lavabit.com."
A new report by a non-aligned United States think tank warns the American cloud computing industry could take a major earnings hit, thanks to former NSA employee Edward Snowden's revelations of indiscriminate government mass surveillance.
In the report [PDF], the Information Technology and Innovation foundation (ITIF) said if non-American companies decided the risks of storing data with US firms outweighed the benfits, the collection of electronic data from third-paties "will likely have immediate and lasting impact on the competitiveness on the US cloud computing industry".
The U.S. government's efforts to recruit talented hackers could suffer from the recent revelations about its vast domestic surveillance programs, as many private researchers express disillusionment with the National Security Agency.
Though hackers tend to be anti-establishment by nature, the NSA and other intelligence agencies had made major inroads in recent years in hiring some of the best and brightest, and paying for information on software flaws that help them gain access to target computers and phones.
National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander jousted with a few hecklers as he defended the US spy agency’s surveillance programs at the Black Hat security conference on Wednesday, but largely kept the crowd of cybersecurity experts and hackers on his side.
“Read the Constitution!” one heckler shouted at the 61-year-old four-star general as he responded to polite but tough questions selected in advance by conference organizers.
Edward Snowden, the fugitive former U.S. security contractor, left the transit zone at Moscow’s international airport Thursday after Russian authorities granted him temporary asylum.
Anatoly Kucherena, an attorney for Snowden, said documents were issued Thursday allowing Snowden to live and work in Russia for up to one year while his application for permanent political asylum is pending. Snowden, 30, had been stranded in Russia’s Sheremetyevo Airport for more than five weeks.
