US

In the wake of the Snowden leaks, the US has been trying to patch up its relationship with its long running ally Germany.

The German government said it was furious when it discovered US spooks were spying on its government.

Now it seems that the US has verbally committed to enter into a no-spying agreement with Germany. But this will just block government and industrial espionage, so presumably citizens are fair game. According to IT World, the verbal commitment was given in talks with the German Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND).

 A Russian man accused of being part of the largest cybercrime ring ever prosecuted in the United States has pleaded not guilty to charges that could send him to prison for decades.

Dmitriy Smilianets, 29, of Moscow, entered the plea during an afternoon hearing in federal court in Newark, New Jersey.

Links between a exploit targeting users of the Tor network and US spy and law enforcement agencies should now be consider tenuous, researchers say.

The attack involved a JavaScript exploit targeting an old version of Firefox then commonly used in the Tor Browser Bundle. It served to identify the IP addresses of vulnerable users and tie them to the Freedom Hosting Tor Hidden Services they were visiting.

A new report by a non-aligned United States think tank warns the American cloud computing industry could take a major earnings hit, thanks to former NSA employee Edward Snowden's revelations of indiscriminate government mass surveillance.

In the report [PDF], the Information Technology and Innovation foundation (ITIF) said if non-American companies decided the risks of storing data with US firms outweighed the benfits, the collection of electronic data from third-paties "will likely have immediate and lasting impact on the competitiveness on the US cloud computing industry".

Snowden slipped out of Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport on Thursday in a cloak-and-dagger operation overseen by his Russian lawyer, but unnoticed by the hordes of media trying to follow his every move.

The White House said it is "extremely disappointed" that the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor was given asylum, and that it would now review plans for a US-Russia presidential summit in September.

The two Russians arrested in what prosecutors call the largest online fraud case brought in the United States were caught through a combination of high-tech tools, dogged detective work and sheer luck.

The propensity of the wealthy young Russians to travel provided authorities with their big opportunity to collar them in the Netherlands last year.

US drivers are being tracked to an unprecedented extent thanks to a system fattened by federal grant money and spurred by the rush to market private automobile data, according to a report by the ACLU.

After analyzing 26,000 pages of documents from police departments spread across the USA, along with information about private companies, the American Civil Liberties Union has produced a report highlighting the large amounts of data public and private companies are storing on drivers, and the poor retention policies that go along with it.

A Southern California woman who mocked American authorities via Twitter—after having fled the country—was finally arraigned on Monday in a San Diego courtroom.

Wanda Lee Ann Podgurski, 60, was arrested in Rosarito, Mexico on July 4, 2013. This was a month after she tweeted “Catch me if you can,” seemingly directed at San Diego District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis, apparently the only person Podgurski followed on Twitter at the time.

A federal judge today rejected the assertion from President Barack Obama’s administration that the state secrets defense barred a lawsuit alleging the government is illegally siphoning Americans’ communications to the National Security Agency.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco, however, did not give the Electronic Frontier Foundation the green light to sue the government in a long-running case that dates to 2008, with trips to the appellate courts in between.

Earlier today, a report in Brazil's daily Globo newspaper claimed that the National Security Agency has been spying on electronic communications and telephone calls originating from the country for the past decade. The Globo story was co-authored by The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald — the journalist who first broke news of sophisticated (and highly classified) US surveillance programs with the help of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.