PRISM

Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all filed petitions Monday with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as part of a renewed effort to reveal more information about government data requests.

The companies had already petitioned the U.S. government to let them be more specific in reporting the volume of national security-related requests they receive, following the first leaks in June about government surveillance programs such as Prism.

The companies said Monday they are pushing harder now because those previous efforts did not pay off.

The latest Snowden-supplied bombshell shook the technology world to its core on Thursday: The NSA can crack many of the encryption technologies in place today, using a mixture of backdoors baked into software at the government's behest, a $250 million per year budget to encourage commercial software vendors to make its security "exploitable," and sheer computer-cracking technological prowess.

"We want to be really, really clear that whenever you give us information, we're going to take it."

These aren't the words of some suede-shoed government spy, trying to put an honest face on an inherently sneaky job.

Thursday's revelation that US and British intelligence agencies are able to decode most Internet traffic was a transforming moment for many, akin to getting definitive proof of intelligent extraterrestrial life. It fundamentally changed the assumptions that many of us have about the tools hundreds of millions of people rely on to shield their most private information from prying eyes. And it challenged the trust placed in the people who build and provide those tools.

Six years ago, two Microsoft cryptography researchers discovered some weirdness in an obscure cryptography standard authored by the National Security Agency. There was a bug in a government-standard random number generator that could be used to encrypt data.

The researchers, Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson, found that the number generator appeared to have been built with a backdoor — it came with a secret numeric key that could allow a third party to decrypt code that it helped generate.

It was only a matter of time before we learned that the NSA has managed to thwart much of the encryption that protects telephone and online communication, but new revelations show the extent to which the agency, and Britain’s GCHQ, have gone to systematically undermine encryption.

Leaks by a fugitive US intelligence contractor have damaged Britain's national security, and the data he gave journalists includes information that might expose the identities of British spies, a government official told the High Court in London.

The official said Brazilian David Miranda, the partner of a Guardian newspaper journalist, was carrying a computer hard-drive containing 58,000 highly classified intelligence documents when he was detained at Heathrow airport earlier this month.

Microsoft and Google may sue US government to allow them to publish user data request from the government after talks with the Justice Department stalled.

The tech giants filed suits in a US federal court in June, arguing a right to make public more information about user data requests made under the auspices of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The technology giants agreed six times to extend the deadline for the government to respond to the lawsuits, the Microsoft's general counsel, Brad Smith, wrote in a blog post.

New revelations about US spying continue to be released "in dribs and drabs," as President Obama recently complained.

Today's information comes courtesy of Der Spiegel, the Germany weekly magazine. While political discussion in the US has focused on the National Security Agency's deviations from its promise to not gather data on Americans, the international press continues to highlight examples of NSA spying that are perfectly legal, but may well stoke public outrage in other nations.

The National Security Agency may have unintentionally collected as many as 56,000 emails of Americans per year between 2008 and 2011, in a program that a secret US court said may have violated US law and the Constitution.

The once-classified documents were released by US intelligence agencies as part of an unprecedented White House effort to smooth the uproar following revelations by former contractor Edward Snowden about the extent of secret government surveillance programs.