NSA

While I think the outrage at the NSA's snooping is more than just a little late (most of the broad strokes of the NSA's signals intelligence programs were public over four years ago) it's fascinating how new details keep emerging most notably from UK's The Guardian newspaper, the paper that Edward Snowden leaked the NSA documents to in the first place.

One of the most interesting os these new details is a system the NSA apparently calls "XKeyscore" and its revelation supports one of Snowden's claims that most people found hard to believe:

Amid growing concerns about loose oversight and insufficient transparency associated with the government's electronic surveillance operations, lawmakers on Thursday plan to introduce legislation that would rein in the authorities of the secret court operating under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Non-U.S. clients of American cloud hosting companies are clearly rattled by revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency collects huge amounts of customer data from Internet Service Providers and telecommunication companies.

The National Security Agency (NSA) needs no new court rulings or eavesdropping tools to see how angry Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) is about its conduct and oversight.

In a 45-minute speech at the Center for American Progress, the senator denounced the combination of an "always expanding, omnipresent surveillance state" and a covert corpus of law that hardly restraints it.

It may well be that the NSA is recording every breath you take, every move you make.

But it's going to take them quite some time to review whether your breaths and moves are, in some way, significant or even troubling.

So along comes an Android app that can help you by forewarning the NSA with "Look! It wasn't me!" I am grateful to Android Central for forewarning me about USA PRISM Plus. Being an Android app, this sprightly invention relies on utter openness. For it takes random shots of your cell phone and sends them to the NSA Careers Twitter account.

A secret court, based in a small, soundproof, and secured room in the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse in Washington, D.C., meets regularly to decide on new and renew existing federal surveillance orders.

A group of tech titans, including Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, threw their substantial weight behind a civil rights alliance that will reportedly demand greater transparency regarding the U.S. government's surveillance programs.

As stories based on Edward Snowden’s trove of leaked National Security Agency (NSA) documents continue to trickle out, most reporters have focused on what they can tell us about the spy agency’s current or recent surveillance activities. Yet one of the most interesting documents from Snowden’s cache, published in full by The Guardian back in June, sheds new light on the granddaddy of them all: President Bush’s original warrantless wiretap program.

In the second part of an exclusive interview with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden contemplates the reaction from the US government to his revelations of top-secret documents regarding its spying operations on domestic and foreign internet traffic, email and phone use. This interview was recorded in Hong Kong on 6 June 2013

The fallout from the recent disclosures of the National Security Agency's secret surveillance programs continues to spread.

On Monday, the European Parliament Civil Liberties Commission voted overwhelmingly to investigate the privacy and civil rights implications of the NSA's PRISM and other spy programs on European citizens, and demanded more information on the programs from U.S. authorities.