NSA

Taking another page out of the WikiLeaks playbook, Edward Snowden has apparently distributed an encrypted copy of at least “thousands” of documents that he pilfered from the National Security Agency to “several people,” according to Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian reporter who first published Snowden’s leaks.

In an interview with the Daily Beast on Tuesday, Greenwald said that Snowden “has taken extreme precautions to make sure many different people around the world have these archives to insure the stories will inevitably be published.”

U.S. officials Monday testily asked the Russian government to expel fugitive document leaker Edward Snowden, who arrived there Sunday after spending several days in hiding in Hong Kong.

In a statement, the White House National Security Council blasted government officials in China and Hong Kong for permitting Snowden to leave despite an official U.S. request to detain him.

Former United States National Security Agency (NSA) employee turned whistleblower Edward Snowden has reportedly revealed attacks by his former employer on network operator Pacnet.

Speaking to Hong Kong's South China Morning Post, Snowden said Pacnet's computers in Hong Kong were attacked by America but did not provide information as to the motive nor whether Pacnet suffered any damage in the now-closed hacking operation.

Everybody's talking about PRISM, the U.S. government's electronic surveillance program.

We don't know all the details about PRISM (also called US-984XN). But we learned enough from a badly designed PowerPoint presentation leaked by NSA contractor Edward Snowden to feel outraged by its reach and audacity. In a nutshell, PRISM (and related telephone surveillance programs) take a big data approach to spying on foreign terrorists using American servers.

Edward Snowden, the former U.S. National Security Agency contractor who leaked information about the country's surveillance programs, left Hong Kong Sunday to a third country.

Snowden left Hong Kong on his own accord for a third country through "a lawful and normal channel," despite an earlier request from the U.S. to Hong Kong for the issue of a provisional warrant of arrest against him, the Hong Kong government said in a statement Sunday. The Hong Kong authorities did not name the country Snowden was headed to.

After a brief respite, the Guardian newspaper has resumed its publication of leaked NSA documents. The latest round provides a look at the secret rules the government follows for collecting data on U.S. persons.

We found a number of interesting disclosures in two documents released by the newspaper. Among them:

Using online anonymity services such as Tor or sending encrypted e-mail and instant messages are grounds for US-based communications to be retained by the National Security Agency even when they're collected inadvertently, according to a secret government document published Thursday.

A lot of people have been worried about their privacy since Edward Snowden blew the whistle on American government spying. A list of companies has been made public that allegedly store your data in such a way that allows for the USA’s NSA branch to easily access it.

As a reaction to this the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has put together a website with software and service alternatives to help increase your privacy, with a focus on FOSS and Linux.

The National Security Agency's Prism surveillance system is a dangerous hostage to fortune that must be countered using public policy and not simply clever security technologies alone, privacy campaigner and encryption luminary Phil Zimmermann has argued.

It's an unexpected position for a man whose new company, Silent Circle, sells possibly the single most credible anti-surveillance service on the market not to mention writing his own chapter in the history books by inventing the legendary Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption software in the early 1990s.

Since The Guardian began leaking top-secret National Security Agency (NSA) documents just 11 days ago, several tech companies responded to the revelations about the PRISM program. The likes of Google, Facebook, and Apple objected to the tone of the press coverage, saying that any suggestion they've ever given a government agency direct access to their servers is false.

Over the weekend, tech companies started responding with additional transparency too. Facebook and Microsoft revealed ranges of how many government information requests they're getting about how many accounts.