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One of the architects of the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping technology told a radio host today the Internal Revenue Service, or IRS, has “direct access” to the NSA’s domestic spying data and was likely using it to target the tea party. NSA whistleblower William Binney was being interviewed on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio” on New York’s 970 AM The Answer when he disclosed the startling revelation. “For example,” Binney said in response to a question on how the NSA can use data and metadata to identify potential threats, “if you started to communicate with people involved in the tea party...

Artist sends the National Spy Agency a super-encrypted “mixtape.” So why would Huerta create a mixtape no one else could open? Well for one, there’s no worry that someday he’ll regret sending our nation’s protectors a whole bunch of mushy love songs that will sound really, really cheesy 10 years from now. Oh, and there’s this, which he posted on his Medium blog: “The NSA can read my stupid Facebook updates but without my consent it will never be able to listen to my kick-ass mix tape, even if it’s sitting right in front of them.” ------(Snip)------ So what would...

New documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden confirm that the NSA and the FBI spy on Muslim-American leaders, including Republican Party politicians and military veterans. The article describes an NSA spreadsheet that “shows 7,485 email addresses listed as monitored between 2002 and 2008.” The National Security Agency and FBI have covertly monitored the emails of prominent Muslim-Americans under secretive procedures intended to target terrorists and foreign spies. According to documents provided by Snowden, the list of Americans monitored by their own government includes: • Faisal Gill, a Pakistani-American, is a longtime Republican Party operative and one-time candidate for public office who...

The House Armed Services Committee has come up with a creative approach to look for emails from embattled former Internal Revenue Service (IRS) official Lois Lerner that were apparently lost in a computer crash: they're asking the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Defense Department. The panel approved a resolution Wednesday authored by Rep. Steve Stockman, R-Texas, that directs the Secretary of Defense to send the House of Representatives "copies of any electronic communication in the possession of the Secretary, the Director of the National Security Agency, or any office that reports to the Secretary or the Director that was...

PARIS -- A newly leaked document stolen by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden last year reveals that one of the NSA's partner agencies within the "Five Eyes" Anglo-intelligence network -- Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), responsible for signals intelligence -- dedicated vast resources to fooling around on the Internet, according to journalist Glenn Greenwald. The GCHQ has reportedly developed tools capable of playing with the results of online polls; sending out spoof emails and Microsoft Office documents that, once opened, can grab and transmit files and info from a user's computer; collecting data from public profiles on...

A fresh set of documents leaked by Edward Snowden show how the UK intelligence agency can manipulate online polls and debates, spread messages, snoop on YouTube and track Facebook users.

The head of Germany's parliamentary inquiry into the NSA spying scandal has suggested the government return to using typewriters to protect national secrets from prying eyes. German soldier allegedly spied for US (09 Jul 14) 'Wake up Germany and smell the cyber-coffee' (08 Jul 14) 'Enough!' Germans say in latest US spy scandal (07 Jul 14) Germany's politicians are considering going back to using old-fashioned typewriters to create sensitive documents, head of the inquiry committee Patrick Sensburg told ARD broadcaster on Monday. “Unlike other inquiry committees, we are investigating an ongoing situation. Intelligence activities are still going on, they are...

Russia is expected to renew former National Security Agency contractor and leaker Edward Snowden’s request for extended asylum because ”his life is endangered,” according to a Russian government official. “I see no problem in prolonging the temporary asylum,” Vladimir Volokh, head of an advisory body to Russia’s Federal Migration Service told the Interfax news agency Friday, according to Reuters. ”The circumstances have not changed. As before, Snowden’s life is endangered so the FMS has grounds to extend his status.” Snowden was granted one year of asylum on Aug. 1, 2013 after leaking a cache of classified NSA intelligence documents to reporters, flying out of...

William Binney is one of the highest-level whistleblowers to ever emerge from the NSA. He was a leading code-breaker against the Soviet Union during the Cold War but resigned soon after September 11, disgusted by Washington’s move towards mass surveillance. On 5 July he spoke at a conference in London organised by the Centre for Investigative Journalism and revealed the extent of the surveillance programs unleashed by the Bush and Obama administrations. “At least 80% of fibre-optic cables globally go via the US”, Binney said. “This is no accident and allows the US to view all communication coming in. At...

Advancements in technology have fueled this White House's obsession with controlling the message. Jay Carney is free. But not loose – at least so far. After resigning as the press secretary for President Obama on June 20, Carney gave insight into the Obama administration’s handling of classified documents, and responded to criticism that this administration has been the most Orwellian in recent history. “I know — because I covered them — that this was said of Clinton and Bush, and it will probably be said of the next White House,” said Carney in a recent New York Times Magazine interview....

In what amounts to a diplomatic earthquake, Berlin has asked the country's top CIA official to leave Germany. The measures comes in response to the second allegation in a week of a German government employee spying for the US.

The German government has ordered the expulsion of a CIA official in Berlin in response to two cases of alleged spying by the US. The official is said to have acted as a CIA contact at the US embassy, reports say, in a scandal that has infuriated German politicians. A German intelligence official was arrested last week on suspicion of spying. An inquiry has also begun into a German defense ministry worker, reports said. “The representative of the US intelligence services at the embassy of the United States of America has been told to leave Germany,” government spokesman Steffen Seibert...

Last week, German journalists revealed that the National Security Agency has a program to collect information about people who use privacy-protecting services, including popular anonymizing software called Tor. But it’s not clear how many users have been affected. So we did a little sleuthing, and found that the NSA’s targeting list corresponds with the list of directory servers used by Tor between December 2010 and February 2012 – including two servers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Tor users connect to the directory servers when they first launch the Tor service.That means that if you downloaded Tor during 2011, the NSA may have scooped up your...

The NSA warrantless surveillance program nominally geared at spying on foreigners has also spied on innocent Americans without a warrant, including a Republican Party operative, a civil rights activist and several university professors. The revelations by investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald raise the possibility that NSA warrantless surveillance has been used for political — rather than security — purposes.

As an Illinois senator running for president in 2008, Barack Obama promised there would be no more "wiretaps without warrants" under his administration. He abandoned that position even before he was elected to the White House, voting for legislation that amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to let the National Security Agency collect Americans' international communications without a warrant. The targets of such surveillance were supposed to be foreigners located outside of the United States, and the purpose of the surveillance was supposed to be the acquisition of "foreign intelligence information," implying that the targets would be suspected spies...

A new report based on NSA documents taken by Edward Snowden has revealed the names of prominent American Muslims whose emails it claims were monitored by the FBI and the NSA for years – the most specific allegation yet of the U.S. government's domestic spying and one that officials said could compromise ongoing operations. The report, published overnight by Glenn Greenwald at the fledgling news outlet The Intercept, identifies five of some 202 “U.S. Persons” listed in NSA documents whose emails were allegedly swept up over a six-year period ending in 2008: Nihad Awad, Executive Director of CAIR, the largest...

"I just Googled “America showtimes” and got one hit towards the bottom which redirects you to a different site that makes you have to click another couple times before finding showtimes. For pretty much every other single movie you google the title and showtimes and the first hit is showtimes at the theaters nearest you."

NEW YORK — Heaps of baby photos, fitness selfies, medical records and resumes are among thousands of private communications scooped up and stored by NSA spy programs. That’s according to new disclosures based on documents Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, gave to The Washington Post — disclosures that show just how easy it is for Americans’ private conversations to be swept into the spy agency’s traps. Snowden provided the Post with what it said were 160,000 intercepted conversations, including e-mails, instant messages, photographs, social network posts and other documents. The trove included messages exchanged from 2009 through...

A few days ago, we asked a simple rhetorical question: "Are you targeted by the NSA?" The answer, sadly for those reading this, is very likely yes, as it was revealed that as part of the NSA's XKeyscore program "a computer network exploitation system, as described in an NSA presentation, devoted to gathering nearly everything a user does on the internet" all it takes for a user to be flagged by America's superspooks is to go to a website the NSA finds less than "patriotic" and that user becomes a fixture for the NSA's tracking algos. So assuming one is...

When the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted the online accounts of legally targeted foreigners over a four-year period it also collected the conversations of nine times as many ordinary Internet users, both Americans and non-Americans, according to a probe by The Washington Post. Nearly half of those surveillance files contained names, email addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents, the Post reported in a story posted on its website Saturday night. […] At the same time, the intercepted messages contained material of considerable intelligence value, the Post reported, such as information about...