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Lon Snowden visited his son, but the place and time of the meeting "are not being been revealed for security reasons", said Russia's state-run TV channels Rossiya 24 and Channel One. Meanwhile, Edward Snowden met four former US security officials in Russia late on Wednesday, it has emerged. The officials - who now campaign against what they describe as the misuse of state secrecy - said they had presented Mr Snowden with the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence award. The award is given annually by a group of retired CIA officers. The officials told Russian media Mr Snowden...

Nick Clegg today hit out at the Guardian for publishing secret files, which served “no purpose” other than to aid terrorists who want to harm Britain. The Lib Dem leader joined the barrage of criticism that the newspaper released UK’s intelligence secrets of no interest to readers, but highly valued by fanatics and foreign spies. … The publication of secret files leaked by US fugitive Edward Snowden are said to have caused huge “harm” to the capability of Britain’s intelligence services. Security officials fear the data will be used by terrorists to avoid detection when plotting an atrocity. …

Edward Snowden has apparently been living a life of poverty in Russia, surviving on meager charitable donations.

The same company that scrutinized former spy agency contractor Edward Snowden for a U.S. government security clearance said on Thursday it also checked the background of the Navy Yard shooter, allowing him to obtain a "secret" clearance. USIS, working as a contractor for the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), conducted a background review of Aaron Alexis, identified by law enforcement authorities as the shooter who killed 12 people at the Navy Yard before he was shot dead. "Today we were informed that in 2007, USIS conducted a background check of Aaron Alexis for OPM," USIS spokesman Ray Howell said in...

(Reuters) - The U.S. National Security Agency has secretly developed the ability to crack or circumvent commonplace Internet encryption used to protect everything from email to financial transactions, according to media reports citing documents obtained by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The Guardian, The New York Times and journalistic nonprofit ProPublica reported on Thursday that the U.S. intelligence agency used a variety of means, ranging from the insertion of "back doors" in popular tech products and services, to supercomputers, secret court orders and the manipulation of international processes for setting encryption standards. The publications said the NSA and its British...

The National Security Agency is winning its long-running secret war on encryption, using supercomputers, technical trickery, court orders and behind-the-scenes persuasion to undermine the major tools protecting the privacy of everyday communications in the Internet age, according to newly disclosed documents. The agency has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world, the documents show. Many users assume — or have been assured...

Reports: G-20 seating chart altered By: Tal Kopan September 5, 2013 07:51 AM EDT Those eager for a potentially awkward photo op of President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin sitting next to each other at the G-20 summit might be disappointed: The seating chart is putting more distance between the two leaders than previously expected. Seating at the summit is alphabetical, but the planners for the event have reportedly changed which alphabet they are using to make the chart, Voice of America and The Guardian reported. In the Cyrillic alphabet, which is used in Russian, Russia and the...

Haima Snowden and you're not! Hainan-based Haima Auto has contracted with the Chinese trademark owner of the “Snowden” name and are planning to use the American asylum-seeking secret-spiller's monniker for a yet-to-be-released EV (electric vehicle). One would hope the upcoming Snowden sedan won't leak as much as its notorious namesake. FAW Haima Automobile Co., Ltd., or Haima for short, is a subsidiary of Chinese state-owned automotive manufacturing company FAW Group founded in 1992 as a joint venture between the government of Hainan province and Japanese automaker Mazda with the original plan being for Haima to produce locally assembled Mazda “clones”...

An estimated one-fifth of a subset of all applicants for Central Intelligence Agency positions had significant ties to the terror groups Hamas, Hezbollah and al Qaeda, a newly released document from NSA leaker Edward Snowden’s collection revealed Monday. The document — released by Mr. Snowden as part of his National Security Agency intelligence dump — said the terrorist groups worked hard to infiltrate America’s top security agencies. CIA officials uncovered thousands of applicants, roughly one in five of a subset, with “significant terrorist and/or hostile intelligence connections,” the document states, as Ynet News reported. The specifics of those ties were...

Individuals with connections to al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations repeatedly tried to obtain jobs in US intelligence community; 'One of five CIA applicants has connections to hostile groups'

British officials said Friday that the trove of documents taken by National Security Agency leaker Edward J. Snowden, which it seized earlier this week at Heathrow airport, contains more than 58,000 “highly classified UK intelligence documents,” which the government now assumes are in foreign hands. Oliver Robbins, the deputy national security adviser for intelligence, security and resilience in the Cabinet Office, told a court in London that Mr. Snowden “indiscriminately appropriated material in bulk,” including personal information that would allow British intelligence staff, some serving overseas, to be identified. The 58,000 documents were among 60 gigabytes of encrypted data seized...

The British government has asked the New York Times to destroy copies of documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden related to the operations of the U.S. spy agency and its British partner, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), people familiar with the matter said. The British request, made to Times executive editor Jill Abramson by a senior official at the British Embassy in Washington D.C., was greeted by Abramson with silence, according to the sources. British officials indicated they intended to follow up on their request later with the Times, but never did, one of the sources said.

U.S. spy agencies have built an intelligence-gathering colossus since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but remain unable to provide critical information to the president on a range of national security threats, according to the government’s top-secret budget. The $52.6 billion “black budget” for fiscal 2013, obtained by The Washington Post from former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, maps a bureaucratic and operational landscape that has never been subject to public scrutiny. The 178-page budget summary for the National Intelligence Program details the successes, failures and objectives of the 16 spy agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community... The summary...

Edward Snowden accessed some secret national security documents by assuming the electronic identities of top NSA officials, said intelligence sources. “Every day, they are learning how brilliant [Snowden] was,” said a former U.S. official with knowledge of the case. “This is why you don’t hire brilliant people for jobs like this. You hire smart people. Brilliant people get you in trouble.”

<p>The media have been given important new information in the case of NSA leaker Edward Snowden and don’t seem to know what to do with it. Snowden has been “outed” by the Russians as their agent.</p> <p>The Washington Post reports that “Before American fugitive Edward Snowden arrived in Moscow in June—an arrival that Russian officials have said caught them by surprise—he spent several days living at the Russian Consulate in Hong Kong, a Moscow newspaper reported Monday.”</p>

<p>Virtually every other show [aside from "Morning Joe"] belongs to hosts who unstintingly support Obama and the Democrats, with only minor points of disagreement. ([Host Chris] Hayes criticizes Obama for his drone killings and surveillance programs, and often conducts friendly interviews with Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who collaborated with Edward Snowden. Melissa Harris-Perry, who appears on weekends at 10 a.m., nearly always defends Obama, and called Glenn Greenwald a “jerk.”) Conservatives are far less visible on MSNBC than liberals are on Fox News, and the right-leaning guests who do appear are typically critics of the conservative movement: Steve Schmidt, the Republican strategist, who says the party is too tolerant of “nuts” and “kooks”; Josh Barro, an advocate for Republican reform who describes himself as “neoliberal”; Abby Huntsman, the daughter of failed presidential candidate Jon, who has described the G.O.P. as a party of “non-inclusion.” The over-all impression is that your average Republican or conservative is simply too fanatical to be part of polite discourse.</p>

Damon praises Snowden for NSA leaks By Rebecca Shabad - 08/26/13 11:46 AM ET Actor Matt Damon is praising National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden's decision to expose classified domestic surveillance programs as "a great thing" for the country. “I think it’s a great thing he did," Damon, who has portrayed CIA agents in the "Bourne" movie trilogy and "The Good Shepherd," said in an interview posted on YouTube on Aug. 22. The Hollywood actor said he hadn’t read everything that Snowden has leaked, but called him a “conscientious guy.” “If we're going to trade our civil liberties for our...

The National Security Agency is facing its worst crisis since the domestic spying scandals four decades ago led to the first formal oversight and overhaul of U.S. intelligence operations. Thanks to former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden's flood of leaks to the media, and the Obama administration's uneven response to them, morale at the spy agency responsible for intercepting communications of terrorists and foreign adversaries has plummeted, former officials say. Even sympathetic lawmakers are calling for new curbs on the NSA's powers. "This is a secret intelligence agency that's now in the news every day," said Michael Hayden, who headed...

The owner of Lavabit tells us that he's stopped using email and if we knew what he knew, we'd stop too. There is no way to do Groklaw without email. Therein lies the conundrum. What to do? What to do? I've spent the last couple of weeks trying to figure it out. And the conclusion I've reached is that there is no way to continue doing Groklaw, not long term, which is incredibly sad. But it's good to be realistic. And the simple truth is, no matter how good the motives might be for collecting and screening everything we...

The Guardian newspaper says British agents destroyed their newsroom hard drives after they began publishing revelations from National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden. In an opinion piece, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger claimed the hard drives were destroyed after weeks of pressure by British government officials. He said the drives were torn apart in the basement of their office building as British intelligence agents looked on. "One of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian's long history occurred with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian's basement just to make sure there was nothing in...