Recent news reports alleging broad surveillance efforts by the U.S. National Security Agency seem to have left more questions than answers. Whistleblower Edward Snowden has accused the NSA of collecting massive amounts of data from U.S. residents, but U.S. officials have largely denied his allegations.
Here's what we know so far, from reports in the U.K.'s Guardian, the Washington Post and other media sources, as well as our own reporting:
There is indeed a growing library about Wikileaks, as a quick search on google/Amazon will tell you (which, you all know, mines your shopping data and patterns to recommend books and other products to you) http://www.amazon.com/Growing-Library-WikiLeaks-Books/lm/R1633HKPBAQHPP. I digress.
President Barack Obama on Friday staunchly defended the sweeping US government surveillance of Americans' phone and internet activity, calling it a "modest encroachment" on privacy that was necessary to defend the United States from attack.
"Nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That's not what this program is about," Obama told reporters during a visit to California's Silicon Valley. He emphasized that the secret surveillance programs were supervised by federal judges and authorized by Congress, which had been briefed on the details.
The National Security Agency has developed a powerful tool for recording and analysing where its intelligence comes from, raising questions about its repeated assurances to Congress that it cannot keep track of all the surveillance it performs on American communications.
Is the National Security Agency (NSA) really "wiretapping" the Internet? Accused accomplices Microsoft and Google deny that they have any part in it and the core evidence isn't holding up that well under closer examination.
Some, however, doubt that the NSA could actually intercept and break Secure-Socket Layer (SSL) protected Internet communications.
Ah, actually the NSA can. And, you can too and it doesn't require "Mission Impossible" commandos, hackers or supercomputers. All you need is a credit-card number.
On Wednesday, The Guardian published a secret order issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court allowing the National Security Agency (NSA) to demand vast swaths of metadata from Verizon. The order, which specifies that Verizon hand over the information on an “ongoing, daily basis,” encompasses the phone records pertaining to all of Verizon's American customers, whether the communications are between US-based callers, or between a US caller and an international caller.
Hackers have sent emails from Belgium's Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo's personal account to De Morgen newspaper, the daily said on Friday.
Dating from 2004 to 2008 when Di Rupo was president of Belgium's socialist party and before he became prime minister in 2011, the emails were mostly of a private nature, although some did refer to his political activities, the paper said.
It did not publish the emails.
Please imagine you were to spend Saturday enjoying a little reading on the beach and then, perhaps, a couple of drinks.
Please imagine you decided to waft down to Northern California's Half Moon Bay and wandered into an establishment called Sam's Chowder House.
It looks like Drupal.org has suffered a security incident that has exposed user names, email addresses and hashed passwords. Via email:
Dear community member,
Harvard College Dean Evelynn Hammonds, who last month acknowledged authorizing a secret search of email belonging to several residential deans at the university, will step down from her position July 1.
