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During a round of morning interviews with several of the major television networks on Wednesday, Secretary of State John Kerry accused NSA [National Security Agency] leaker Edward Snowden of engaging in the same kind of betrayal and traitorous activities that Kerry once participated in. When Kerry returned from the Vietnam War in the early 70's, he accused his fellow American soldiers of committing war crimes. Kerry's accusations provoked the ire of countless Vietnam War vets who said that not only was Kerry falsely maligning them, but that he was guilty of betrayal and that he was harming American POW's in...

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...

Edward Snowden Describes When The CIA Got A Swiss Banker Drunk The former NSA/CIA employee who leaked documents about several invasive government spying programs, Edward Snowden has had growing doubts about the government for a long time, according to a interview in the Guardian. One "formative" incident occurred around 2007, when the young technical analyst was working for the CIA under diplomatic cover in Geneva, Switzerland. It involved a Swiss banker, as described in the Guardian: CIA operatives were attempting to recruit a Swiss banker to obtain secret banking information. Snowden said they achieved this by purposely getting the banker...

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...

Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who helped NSA leaker Edward Snowden expose state secrets to the world, is set to make his “biggest” disclosure yet — the names of Americans the government spied on, he told The Sunday Times.Greenwald added that Snowden’s legacy will be “shaped in large part” by this “finishing piece,” which is based on information obtained in the nearly 2 million documents the former NSA contractor secretly stole from the government.

Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday called National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden a fugitive and challenged him to "man up and come back to the United States." Kerry was asked about Snowden in a nationally broadcast interview in the wake of an interview in which Snowden said he never intended to be holed up in Russia but was forced to go there because Washington decided to "revoke my passport." Asked about this, Kerry replied on NBC's "Today" show: "Well, for a supposedly smart guy, that's a pretty dumb answer, after all."

Edward J. Snowden says he was not merely a “low-level analyst” writing computer code for American spies, as President Obama and other administration officials have portrayed him. Instead, he says, he was a trained spy who worked under assumed names overseas for the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. “I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word in that I lived and worked undercover overseas — pretending to work in a job that I’m not — and even being assigned a name that was not mine,” Mr. Snowden told Brian Williams...

Former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked details of massive U.S. intelligence-gathering programs, said in a U.S. TV interview he "was trained as a spy" and had worked undercover overseas for U.S. government agencies. In an advance excerpt of his interview in Moscow with "NBC Nightly News" that aired on Tuesday, Snowden rejected comments by critics that he was a low-level analyst. "Well, it's no secret that the U.S. tends to get more and better intelligence out of computers nowadays than they do out of people," Snowden told NBC news anchor Brian Williams. "I was trained as a...

BEIJING -- A Chinese Internet information body has complained of "unscrupulous" surveillance by U.S. intelligence agencies over the rest of the world, and called for an immediate cessation of the practice. A report by China's Internet Media Research Center published on Monday said the U.S. has taken advantage of its political, economic, military and technological hegemony to spy without restraint on other countries, including its allies. The operations have gone "far beyond the legal rationale of 'anti-terrorism' and have exposed the ugly face of its pursuit of self-interest in complete disregard for moral integrity," the report read. It added that...

The National Security Agency is secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas. According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the surveillance is part of a top-secret system – code-named SOMALGET – that was implemented without the knowledge or consent of the Bahamian government. Instead, the agency appears to have used access legally obtained in cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to open a backdoor to the country’s cellular telephone network, enabling it to covertly record and store the “full-take audio” of every mobile call...

<p>I will take credit for being one of the first to point out the fact that Snowden’s whistleblower narrative was a total crock because after the initial flurry his leaks had little to do with NSA surveillance of individuals, but instead revealed information that was highly damaging to US national security and foreign policy. The only question in my mind was when he was when he became a Russian asset. I still don’t know, but as I also pointed out a while ago, the fact that collected disproportionately such national security-related information made it very plausible that he was tasked to collect this information, and given the identity of the ultimate beneficiary-Russia-it was also plausible that he was Russia’s witting or unwitting tool from the get go.</p>

Those who know the files he stole think he was working for a foreign power, perhaps Russia, where he now lives. -excerpt- The vast majority of those [stolen documents] were related to our military capabilities, operations, tactics, techniques and procedures. ...the media and Mr. Snowden's admirers have only his word as to what went on. His detractors are the people who know enough about what happened to conclude that far from being a whistleblower, Mr. Snowden was a participant in an espionage operation...

(Reuters) - Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who revealed the U.S. government's data collection programs, is now likely under the control of Russian intelligence agencies, according to former NSA Director, General Keith Alexander. Alexander, who retired on March 31, made the comments in an interview with The Australian Financial Review newspaper to be published on Thursday, a transcript of which was made available to Reuters ahead of publication.

Everyone seems to forget that the FBI is the NSA's primary partner in the latter's domestic spying operations and that, in fact, the NSA's job would be impossible without them. Whenever you see a company deny giving any data to the NSA remember: It's because it's not the NSA asking (or demanding) the information of them, it's the FBI.

A few weeks back, I read a Washington Post story "Inside the admissions process at George Washington University" and noted this interesting tidbit towards the end: GW also asks students to list a role model and two words to describe themselves. As for herself, Freitag said, she would list “Martha Stewart/Tina Fey” and “sassy/classy.” This year, she’s seeing a lot of Edward Snowden citations. I had thought about writing it up, but decided it was a pretty small thing, really. It's not secret that, as a group, younger people have a much more favorable impression of Snowden than older people....

Imagine you were in the position of Snowden. As a contractor to the National Security Agency, you knew that your government was monitoring what seemed to be an indefensible amount of electronic communication, from emails, to phone calls, between ordinary Americans. What would you do? Perhaps you would: Resign in protest? Go to the Press with declassified information? Point the Press in the right direction, to ask the right questions? Go public? Other whistleblowers in modern American history, such as Daniel Ellsberg, are today hailed as heroes. Help to start a national conversation about fundamental privacy rights, and the Constitutional...

ON JULY 2 LAST YEAR, the governments of Portugal, France, Italy, and Spain bowed to US orders and refused airspace to the plane carrying Bolivian president Evo Morales. He’d been traveling from Russia to South America until his presidential jet was forced to land in Vienna. Morales and his ministers were stranded there for 15 hours. Acting on bad intelligence or mere suspicions, the higher-ups in the Obama administration, and perhaps President Obama himself, decreed this embarrassing, unprecedented, and illegal detention of a foreign sovereign. The lies fed to Morales and his pilots in Vienna — that there were “technical”...

NSA leaker Edward Snowden asked Russian President Vladimir Putin about whether Russia uses its own mass surveillance system, in a video during a question-and-answer session on Russian television.

On Monday, April 14, 2014, the Pulitzer Prize, the most prestigious award in American journalism, was awarded to the Washington Post and (UK’s) The Guardian for their coverage related to the revelations of spy, Edward Snowden. Apparently, for those on the Pulitzer committee, it’s still ethical to betray your country and carry water for the Russian military and intelligence. Still ethical? Yes. At a press conference held at the Women’s National Republican Club prior to the announcement, Accuracy in Media, a journalistic watchdog based in Washington, D.C., recounted the circumstances around another Pulitzer Prize, to Walter Duranty. Speaking at the...