The National Security Agency collaborated with the Israeli government to create the program used in a cyber-attack that disrupted Iran's uranium processing capability and delayed its nuclear ambitions, former intelligence consultant and whistleblower Edward Snowden said in an interview published in the German magazine Der Spiegel.
Earlier today, a report in Brazil's daily Globo newspaper claimed that the National Security Agency has been spying on electronic communications and telephone calls originating from the country for the past decade. The Globo story was co-authored by The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald — the journalist who first broke news of sophisticated (and highly classified) US surveillance programs with the help of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation’s surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks, officials say.
Chief justice of the United States is a pretty big job. You lead the Supreme Court conferences where cases are discussed and voted on. You preside over oral arguments. When in the majority, you decide who writes the opinion. You get a cool robe that you can decorate with awesome gold stripes.
Oh, and one more thing: You have exclusive, unaccountable, lifetime power to shape the surveillance state.
Crowds across the U.S. gathered Thursday to protest the federal government’s surveillance of the American public – recently highlighted by leaker Edward Snowden – as part of pro-Forth Amendment rallies, chanting “NSA go away!”
More than 400 people gathered in New York and Washington D.C., while around 300 people were estimated to be in San Francisco.
A plane carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales was forced into making an unscheduled stop in Austria after France and Portugal denied the plane passage over their airspace on the belief that document leaker Edward Snowden was on board, reports say.
President Morales was returning home to Bolivia from a visit to Moscow when the plane had to be diverted to Vienna, the BBC reported on Tuesday. It wasn't immediately clear how or why the plane was forced to land in Austria.
Doors kept closing for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden tonight, as the former U.S. government contractor withdrew his request for asylum in Russia and got a new batch of refusals from some of the 19 countries he has reportedly begged for mercy. In his appeal to the Polish government, which was rejected, he said he fears execution or life imprisonment in the United States. Meanwhile, the Bolivian president's jet made an unexpected stop in Vienna after leaving Moscow today, leading to rumors that Snowden was aboard.
Although now reported and fixed, a report found that there were cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities on the main NSA forward facing web server. The report claimed that two vulnerabilities were found in "shoddily outsourced third party software written in ColdFusion", which Rustle Research researcher Horace Grant said could be used to impersonate NSA personnel and web traffic.
He said: “Why are unreliable third parties creating the software that guards our national secrets?"
US intelligence agencies have sprung so many leaks over the last few years—black sites, rendition, drone strikes, secret fiber taps, dragnet phone record surveillance, Internet metadata collection, PRISM, etc, etc—that it can be difficult to remember just how truly difficult operations like the NSA have been to penetrate historically. Critics today charge that the US surveillance state has become a self-perpetuating, insular leviathan that essentially makes its own rules under minimal oversight. Back in 1975, however, the situation was likely even worse.
New "top secret" slides released by The Washington Post on Saturday shed further light on the U.S. National Security Agency's (NSA) PRISM program, which was first publicly disclosed through a series of leaks by former government contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden earlier this month.
