NSA

A 5-month-old company in Washington has developed what it calls groundbreaking technology to thwart cyber-attacks before they've been identified - a significant advancement over current systems that react to known threats.

Trouble is, the founder of the company, Keith Alexander, headed the US National Security Agency until March, and his plan to patent the technology is drawing criticism from people who say he's profiting from work he did for the government.

The National Security Agency is secretly providing data to nearly two dozen U.S. government agencies with a “Google-like” search engine built to share more than 850 billion records about phone calls, emails, cellphone locations, and internet chats, according to classified documents obtained by The Intercept.

The National Security Agency built a "Google-like" search engine to give domestic and international government agencies access to details of billions of calls, texts and instant messages sent by millions of people, according to The Intercept.

The search engine, called ICReach, had behind it roughly 850 billion pieces of metadata in 2007 on calls made largely but not exclusively by foreign nationals, the report said.

Edward Snowden has given a long interview to Wired magazine in which he reveals that he has not read all of the NSA documents that he took with him when he left, but is shocked by the ones that he has.

Snowden met journalist James Bamford in clandestine circumstances in Russia, a country that recently extended his asylum with a residence permit. During the interview, which took place over several days, he revealed that the NSA has an autonomous system for tracking and retaliating to cyber attacks, and said that it is called Monstermind.

Wired is out with a major cover story this morning featuring former NSA contractor Edward Snowden clutching a giant American flag. In it, Snowden uncovers knowledge about an NSA program known as MonsterMind, which, if true, could signal a big step in how the U.S. government traces cyberattacks back to their source.

MonsterMind can reportedly analyze incoming malware and block it, according to Wired. But the real power lies in MonsterMind's other capability: It's reportedly capable of hacking back at targets automatically:

National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake says Australia's looming national security reforms makes him 'shudder', labelling them ambiguous and a plot to stamp out legitimate public-interest whistleblowing.

Drake, who Edward Snowden said was his inspiration for leaking the NSA spy documents, blew the lid in 2006 on the NSA's massively inefficient Trailblazer Project while at the agency that wasted billions of US dollars in spy operations post 9/11.

A new Senate proposal to curb the government's bulk collection of Americans' telephone records and increase transparency about the program has White House backing, and may get more traction with critics who have dismissed other bills as too weak.

Democrat senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, introduced the legislation in the United States upper house yesterday.

Think you're safe from spies because you're using Tails, the same Linux distribution that Edward Snowden uses to remain anonymous?

Unfortunately, you'll still have to be on your guard. Security firm Exodus Intelligence has revealed that the latest version of the OS, 1.1, is vulnerable to attacks that could be used to unmask your identity. The researchers say they won't publish details of the exploit until there's a patch, but the Tails team will have to wait up to a week before it gets a report it can use to whip up an emergency fix.

Just as civil liberties groups challenge the legality of the UK intelligence agency’s mass surveillance programs, a catalog of exploit tools for monitoring and manipulation is leaked online.

We already knew that the dragnet style of data collection employed by the NSA resulted in a huge level of collateral damage. As revealed by whistle-blower Edward Snowden the agency had been intercepting huge amounts of web traffic -- often with the assistance of web firms -- on an almost unbelievable scale.