Skip to main content

PRISM

60 Minutes Puff Piece Claims NSA Saved U.S. From Cyberterrorism

posted onDecember 17, 2013
by l33tdawg

Well, don’t we feel just a little bit ashamed today. While we’ve been whining about trivia like the frightening scope of the NSA’s domestic spying programs – scooping up all our cell phone records, wiretapping American tech companies – the criminally poor oversight provided by rubber stamp lawmakers, and the flagrant lies of top level spooks like DNI James Clapper, the poor misunderstood folks at Ft. Meade have been quietly saving each and one of us from a Chinese plot to destroy all of our computers. Every last one of them.

Officials Say U.S. May Never Know Extent of Snowden's Leaks

posted onDecember 16, 2013
by l33tdawg

American intelligence and law enforcement investigators have concluded that they may never know the entirety of what the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden extracted from classified government computers before leaving the United States, according to senior government officials.

Show us a better way than collecting metadata, NSA director says to critics

posted onDecember 12, 2013
by l33tdawg

Critics of the U.S. National Security Agency’s bulk collection of U.S. residents’ telephone records should offer a better way to track terrorists and protect the country against attacks, the agency’s director said Wednesday.

The NSA’s bulk collection of U.S. telephone records is the “least intrusive” way to track suspected terrorists’ communications with people in the U.S., General Keith Alexander said, defending the NSA’s mass data collection and surveillance programs to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.

The chilling effect: Snowden, the NSA, and IT security

posted onDecember 2, 2013
by l33tdawg

When we look back at 2013 a decade from now, the one technology story that's likely to have the biggest long-term impact is the Edward Snowden revelations.

While there were major password breaches at Adobe, Evernote, and Twitter as well as the Healthcare.gov debacle, nothing rocked the IT world more than the 200,000 classified documents that Snowden leaked to the press, uncovering the NSA's startling digital surveillance programs that reach more broadly across the internet than even many of the most extreme conspiracy theorists would have feared.

Despite US opposition, UN approves rights to privacy in the digital age

posted onNovember 28, 2013
by l33tdawg

The United Nations on Wednesday approved 18 draft resolutions, notably "The right to privacy in the digital age," despite opposition from the U.S. government.

It is the first such document to establish privacy rights and human rights in the digital sphere.