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MI6 has pulled its spies out of 'hostile countries' and America's intelligence agencies are on high alert after Russia and China cracked encrypted files leaked by fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden. The top-secret documents contain information that could lead to the identification of British and American spies, according to senior officials in Downing Street, the Home Office and the security services. A senior Home Office official accused Snowden - the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor responsible for the biggest confidential information leak in US history - of having 'blood on his hands' after they gained access to over one million...

The man playing the role of Edward Snowden in the $300 million Oregon production of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will not rot in prison for blowing the whistle on former governor John A. Kitzhaber—who in this Left Coast drama was playing the role of Hillary R. Clinton. Michael Rodgers was the interim administrator of the state's Enterprise Technology Services division of the Department of Administrative Services and a man with 200 employees under his sway and 15 years on the books when Feb. 5 Jan Murdock sent him an email directing him to destroy all of the...

Britain has pulled out agents from live operations in "hostile countries" after Russia and China cracked top-secret information contained in files leaked by former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, the Sunday Times reported. Security service MI6, which operates overseas and is tasked with defending British interests, has removed agents from certain countries, the newspaper said, citing unnamed officials at the office of British Prime Minister David Cameron, the Home Office (interior ministry) and security services. SNIP Russia and China have both managed to crack encrypted documents which contain details of secret intelligence techniques that could allow British and...

Earlier this spring, the cybersecurity firm Kaspersky was testing an advanced antivirus software on one of its computers when it stumbled on something big: As the Moscow-based company puts it, it was "one of the most skilled, mysterious and powerful" spy viruses in the world. The piece of software was so sophisticated that it left few traces. It didn't leave files on the disk drive, and to stay hidden, it burrowed inside a computer's kernel memory, which is the place where a computer's most basic software is kept.Kaspersky says it assigned a team to watch its movements, and the team...

Well, this is a new one.While announcing his candidacy for the highest office in the land, newly minted Democratic presidential candidate and former Rhode Island senator and governor Lincoln Chafee made the bold case for … the U.S. to switch to the metric system?Bloomberg's Dave Weigel was there: Chafee, a Republican-turned-independent-turned-Democrat, gave a brief and chipper address that called for America to re-engage with "international community" with diplomacy and "symbolic" moves. That meant everything from barring campaign donors from becoming diplomats, to allowing Edward Snowden to come home without punishment, to bringing America into the Metric system."It doesn't take long...

The famous (and in some circles infamous) former CIA infrastructure analyst Edward Snowden has written an op-ed for the New York Times about what he calls “a post-terror generation” that’s ”finally standing up for the right to privacy.” Snowden first explains that when he sounded the alarm about the NSA’s ridiculously broad spying program he was persecuted and deemed a traitor (which is why he had to flee to Russia). In the years since, though, a lot has changed: "Two years on, the difference is profound. In a single month, the N.S.A.’s invasive call-tracking program was declared unlawful by the...

To say that the Daily Kos, Democratic Underground, and other progressive sites have carried the water for Obama since he emerged on the national stage is a drastic understatement. They've covered up lies, downplayed scandals, accused Republicans of everything from rape to murder, and through it all declared Barack Obama as one of their greatest heroes. It takes a lot to turn the opinions of blinded sheep like these. And while they have yet to awaken to who the President really is, the NSA scandal and the government's stance on Edward Snowden has started to make them hate the man...

The National Security Agency and its closest allies planned to hijack data links to Google and Samsung app stores to infect smartphones with spyware, a top-secret document reveals. The surveillance project was launched by a joint electronic eavesdropping unit called the Network Tradecraft Advancement Team, which includes spies from each of the countries in the “Five Eyes” alliance — the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia. The top-secret document, obtained from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, was published Wednesday by CBC News in collaboration with The Intercept. The document outlines a series of tactics that the NSA...

An American cyberattack on North Korea half a decade ago was fruitless overall, sources say. The National Security Agency (NSA) led a mission in 2010 to damage North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, Reuters reported on Friday. Operatives tried using a variant of the Stuxnet computer virus deployed against Iran that same year, the news service said, with developers crafting a version that would activate once it reached Korean-language settings on targeted machines. Operatives hoped the virus would disable centrifuges for enriching uranium, much like it had when used against Iran, Reuters said, but the cyberattack stumbled when it encountered North...

Donald Trump broached the idea of execution for National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden for the second time in a week Monday. "I think Snowden is a terrible threat, I think he's a terrible traitor, and you know what we used to do in the good old days when we were a strong country? You know what we used to do to traitors, right?" Trump said on the "Fox & Friends" program. "Well, you killed them, Donald," host Eric Bolling replied. Trump appears highly distressed with the whole affair. Snowden is in a Moscow airport, and the U.S. government wants...

The National Security Agency planned to infiltrate the Google and Samsung app stores to plant spying software on smartphones, according to new documents published from files leaked by Edward Snowden. The Intercept and CBC News jointly published the documents Thursday, which outline the snooping efforts designed by the U.S. and its “Five Eyes” alliance: Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia. The intelligence agencies came up with the strategy as a potential way to hack smartphones. The pilot project was code-named “IRRITANT HORN.” Essentially, the agents sussed out smartphone Internet traffic by browsing through its Web traffic database created...

Even though Edward Snowden is in exile in Moscow, he's still hard at work — although he won't reveal what exactly he is working on quite yet because he believes in being judged on the results. Whatever he's working on, the former NSA contractor who exposed controversial US surveillance practices, says it's much tougher than his last gig. "The fact is I was getting paid an extraordinary amount of money for very little work with very little in the way of qualifications. That's changed significantly," Snowden said in an event at Stanford University on Friday, via teleconference from Moscow. "I...

A US appeals court has ruled that the NSA's dragnet of millions of Americans' phone calls is illegal, and Edward Snowden served as the catalyst for the decision. "Americans first learned about the telephone metadata program that appellants now challenge on June 5, 2013, when the British newspaper The Guardian published a FISC order leaked by former government contractor Edward Snowden," the court noted.

The program also allowed agents to monitor calls the ruled out the possibility of foreign ties to the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building by American Timothy McVeigh. The program only recently shuttered, and was used for nearly two decades, with top Justice Department officials in four administrations - George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama - approving the data collections. The data collection did not however allow DEA investigators access to the actual content of calls, just the numbers dialed and time of the calls were all recorded. A 1998 request for Sprint...

New Zealand is conducting mass surveillance over its Pacific neighbours, reports citing documents leaked by US whistleblower Edward Snowden say. Calls, emails and social media messages were being collected from Pacific nations, the New Zealand Herald said. The data was shared with other members of the "Five Eyes" network - the US, Australia, Britain and Canada.

A State Department whistleblower has come forward to say the details of a former colleague’s account of the sifting of Benghazi-related documents to identify damaging material “ring true.” The Daily Signal reported Monday on Raymond Maxwell, a former deputy assistant secretary at the State Department who says he observed an unusual after-hours session in a basement operations room of the agency’s headquarters in Washington in October 2012. Maxwell said a State Department office director told him those present were ordered to separate out any documents related to the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attacks on Americans in Benghazi that could prove...

British spies have warned the government they may cut off ties with their German counterparts over a parliamentary inquiry into spying by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Focus magazine reported on Thursday that top spies at Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) are concerned that the Bundestag’s (German parliament) inquiry into the NSA could uncover secrets about how they cooperate with their German allies. Gerhard Schindler, head of Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), reportedly told the leaders of the inquiry about the increased tension with his British colleagues on Wednesday evening. “Without information from British signals intelligence, we would...

Bill Maher is throwing some shade on President Obama's credentials as a supposed champion of freedom of the press. The host of HBO's "Real Time" sat down Friday to discuss media coverage of secret government work with documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, one of the journalists centrally involved in bringing revelations from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden to light. "I don't understand why he is perhaps the worst president we've had on clamping down on the press," Maher said. "He's used the Espionage Act more than any other president, right?" Maher added. Other members of the media have blasted...

Apple's iPhone has "special software" that authorities can activate remotely to be able to gather information about the user.

A top EU official wants internet and telecommunication companies to hand over encryption keys to police and spy agencies as part of a wider crackdown on terrorism. The EU’s counter-terrorism coordinator, Gilles de Kerchove, in a document leaked by London-based civil liberties group Statewatch, says the European Commission should come up with rules that require the firms to help national governments snoop on possible suspects. “Since the Snowden revelations, internet and telecommunications companies have started to use often decentralized encryption, which increasingly makes lawful interception by the relevant national authorities technically difficult or even impossible,” notes de Kerchove in the...