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ProtonMail is a new email service that is developed by a team of scientists working at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. Our goal is simple: we want to protect people around the world from the mass surveillance that is currently being perpetrated by governments and corporations around the world. We believe that privacy is a fundamental human right that must be protected at any cost. The advent of the internet has now made all of us more vulnerable to mass surveillance than at any other point in human history. The disappearance of online privacy is...

Three senators are doubling down on their call for a sweeping end to the National Security Agency’s “dragnet surveillance.” Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.) pledged on Tuesday to fight against “limited” and “watered down” legislation to reform the spy agency, which they said includes the bill that passed the House last month. “This is clearly not the meaningful reform that Americans have demanded, so we will vigorously oppose this bill in its current form and continue to push for real changes to the law,” they wrote in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times....

WASHINGTON (AP) — The CIA and other spy agencies are scrambling to close intelligence gaps as they seek ways to support possible military or covert action against the leaders of the al-Qaida-inspired militant group that has seized parts of Iraq and threatens Baghdad's government. The lack of clear intelligence appears to have shifted President Barack Obama's immediate focus away from airstrikes in Iraq because officials said there are few obvious targets. However, officials said no final decisions had been made and suggested Obama ultimately could approve strikes if strong targets do become available. As the U.S. intensifies its intelligence collection...

Anyone here who gets the constant calls from "Rachel from Cardmemeber Services" or the Myriad of calls from all the other cell phone robocallers that offer to re-finance your home or credit card and are really just phishing for your credit card number or credit information. These damned fraudsters will call your cell phone with unsolicted calls (which is illegal by the way) and your home phone as well. They always seem to start with a pre-recorded message saying to press 1 which then routes you to a live operator who will take your information if you are gulible to...

Pressed to supply information in response to lawsuits charging that its widespread surveillance of US citizens is illegal, NSA Deputy Director Richard Ledgett contends that his agency cannot comply because “we’ve lost control over our computer system. We couldn’t retrieve the subpoenaed information if we wanted to. It’s like some kind of ‘Skynet’–alien and artificial intelligence has blocked access to all our data.” Ledgett told US District for the Northern District of California Judge Jeffrey White “we’re as scared about this as anyone. We don’t know who’s side the computer is on. We’d like to think that since we programmed...

...[M]oments ago, representative Steve Stockman (R-Texas) announced he would request that the National Security Agency help in the hunt for missing emails to and from the IRS’s Lois Lerner, and recover two years worth of "lost" emails. [....] And now the NSA is caught between a rock and a hard place: because if it refuses an official congressional demand, it shows once again that the spy agency is entirely separated from any concept of checks and balances and accountability; if it complies, it confirms that all the NSA is, considering it can't even tap into a bunch of Al Qaeda...

Earlier this year, Sauk Rapids satirist Dan McCall won a legal victory over the federal government after National Security Agency reps tried to get online retailers to stop selling shirts emblazoned with the the agency's seal and slogans like this: "The NSA: The only part of government that actually listens." The NSA essentially claimed their logo is copyrighted and couldn't be used without permission, an argument that didn't pass muster in light of the First Amendment's protection of satire. Now, a pro-Hillary Clinton group is making a version of that same argument to once again get McCall's products pulled from...

U.S. pushing local cops to stay mum on cellular surveillance Thu, 06/12/2014 Sun-Times wires WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has been quietly advising local police not to disclose details about surveillance technology they are using to sweep up basic cellphone data from entire neighborhoods, The Associated Press has learned. Citing security reasons, the U.S. has intervened in routine state public records cases and criminal trials regarding use of the technology. This has resulted in police departments withholding materials or heavily censoring documents in rare instances when they disclose any about the purchase and use of such powerful surveillance equipment. Federal...

The National Security Agency recently used a novel argument for not holding onto information it collects about users online activity: it's too complex. The agency is facing a slew of lawsuits over its surveillance programs, many launched after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked information on the agency's efforts last year. One suit that pre-dates the Snowden leaks, Jewel v. NSA, challenges the constitutionality of programs that the suit allege collect information about American's telephone and Internet activities. In a hearing Friday, U.S. District for the Northern District of California Judge Jeffrey S. White reversed an emergency order he had...

Will Glenn Greenwald be releasing the names collected by Edward Snowden of Americans spied upon by the NSA this week? Tomorrow or Tuesday would be the PERFECT days to release such names. Why? Because Tuesday is the the official date of the release of Hillary's ghost written book to the public and such a release of names would suck the oxygen out of its publicity.

A federal judge has ordered the government to stop destroying National Security Agency surveillance records that could be used to challenge the legality of its spying programs in court. U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White’s ruling came at the request of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is in the midst of a case challenging NSA’s ability to surveil foreign citizen’s U.S.-based email and social media accounts. According to the EFF, the signals intelligence agency and the Department of Justice were knowingly destroying key evidence in the case by purposefully misinterpreting earlier preservation orders by multiple courts,

The new director of the National Security Agency on Tuesday acknowledged that the agency uses facial-recognition tools but said the intent is primarily to identify terrorists and help prevent attacks — adding that such technologies are not broadly directed against Americans. “We do not do this on some unilateral basis against U.S. citizens,” said Adm. Michael S. Rogers, in some of his first public remarks since taking the helm of the embattled spy agency two months ago. A year after the first leaks emerged about the scope of NSA surveillance programs, Rogers is seeking to reframe the public debate that...

Judging from her fading smile, it appears that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi thought her meeting with a group of teenagers would be an easy photo op with no hard questions. She was wrong.

This is Secretary of State John Kerry’s answer.... “He should man up, come back to the United States. If he has a complaint about what’s wrong with American surveillance, come back here and stand in our system of justice and make his case....” The argument has a specious attractiveness; however, its premises are arbitrary, its logic shaky, and its implications pernicious. ...It is true that some disobedients, such as Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Rosa Parks, did not seek to evade punishment. It is also true, however, that they could not possibly have done so, for...

The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents. The spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications, the N.S.A. documents reveal. Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the N.S.A. finds intelligence targets around the world, the documents show....

Over the past 24 hours the website for TrueCrypt (a very widely used encryption solution) was updated with a rather unusually styled message stating that TrueCrypt is “considered harmful” and should not be used.

Ten years before Edward Snowden revealed his bombshell that the United States government was electronically spying on people on a massive scale there was Bay Area-resident Mark Klein. Nannett Miranda reports. Ten years before Edward Snowden revealed his bombshell that the United States government was electronically spying on people on a massive scale there was Bay Area resident Mark Klein. As a San Francisco-based AT&T technician in 2003, he installed a splitter that sent a copy of communications data to a secret room set up by the NSA in his South of Market office building. "I knew right away that...

Video:New reporting seems to confirm government leaker Edward Snowden’s claim that he tried to bring his concerns up the chain of command before leaking top-secret documents to the press. “I actually did go through channels, and that is documented,” he told NBC in an interview on Wednesday evening. “The NSA [National Security Agency] has records, they have copies of emails right now to their Office of General Counsel, to their oversight and compliance folks, from me raising concerns about the NSA’s interpretations of its legal authorities.”[snip]n the April 5, 2013, email, he questioned the spy agency’s legal rationale for snooping...

Thanks to Edward Snowden, we know the apparatus of repression has been covertly attached to the democratic state. However, our struggle to retain privacy is far from hopeless.

Glenn Greenwald, one of the reporters who chronicled the document dump by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden via the U.K. press, now said he’s set to publish his most dramatic piece yet: The names of those in the United States targeted by the NSA. “One of the big questions when is comes to domestic spying is, ‘Who have been the NSA’s specific targets?’ Are they political critics and dissidents and activists? Are they genuinely people we’d regard as terrorists? What are the metrics and calculations that go into choosing those targets and what is done with the surveillance that...