Snowden

Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden succeeded where President Barack Obama couldn't - getting Microsoft, Google and Yahoo to upgrade computer security against hackers.

The European Commission has called on the US to provide guarantees to restore trust in the wake of revelations of mass internet surveillance by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Until now, trust has relied on the Safe Harbor Privacy Principles designed to ensure US companies respect EU citizens’ right to protection of personal data.

A U.S. email provider can promise its users all the security and privacy it wants; it still has to do whatever it takes to give the government access.

That’s the gist of the Justice Department’s 60-page appellate brief in the Lavabit surveillance case, filed today in the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia.

Microsoft has confirmed to SCMagazineUK.com that it is considering encrypting customers' personal data which it sends over the internet, in the wake of the allegations of mass electronic surveillance by the NSA.

The revelation that Microsoft is “evaluating additional changes that may be beneficial to further protect our customers' data” came after its EMEA vice president of legal and corporate affairs, Dorothee Belz, faced tough questioning on Monday from a Committee of European MEPs.

Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, claims that al Qaeda has changed the way it communicates in the light of Edward Snowden's leaks.

Talking to CBS's Face the Nation, Rogers said if Snowden disclosed classified information that has allowed three different terrorist organisations, affiliates of al Qaeda to change the way it communicates.

Facebook was already implementing stronger security controls when the U.S. National Security Agency's expansive surveillance program was revealed in June, its chief security officer said Thursday.

The social networking site has continued upgrading its security infrastructure, said Joe Sullivan[cq], who spoke to IDG News Service by phone from the Hack in the Box security conference in Kuala Lumpur.

The volume and level of detail of the classified documents describing government intelligence gathering leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden indicate that he might not have acted alone, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) said today.

 Edward Snowden's unprecedented exposure of US technology companies' close collaboration with national intelligence agencies, widely expected to damage the industry's financial performance abroad, may actually end up helping.

Despite emphatic predictions of waning business prospects, some of the big internet companies that the former National Security Agency contractor showed to be closely involved in gathering data on people overseas - such as Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. - say privately that they have felt little if any impact on their businesses.

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.

It's been known for a while that Edward Snowden was a systems administrator for Booz Allen Hamilton doing contract work for the NSA when he obtained the documents which he subsequently leaked to the press. But how did he get at these documents? NBC News has an investigations story on "How Snowden did it" which purports to explain.