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The US cloud industry faces up to €25.8 billion in lost revenues following revelations about US-led snooping on EU citizens. “The surveillance revelations will cost the US cloud computing industry USD 22 to 35 billion in lost revenues over the next three year,” said EU justice commissioner Viviane Reding on Sunday (19 January) at the Digital Life Design Conference in Munich. …

Germany and the US appear to be edging closer to political confrontation. The Federal Prosecutor says there is sufficient evidence to open a politically explosive investigation into NSA spying on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone. […] In the close to eight months that have passed since the first reports were published about the National Security Agency’s massive spying operations, the only things Germany has been given by the US are well-meaning assurances. Last summer, the German government sent a list of questions about their surveillance programs to the Americans and the British, whose GCHQ intelligence agency has likewise been accused...

A federal judge in a Chicago terrorism case says the government doesn’t have to disclose whether it employed the kind of phone and Internet surveillance revealed in leaks by ex-government contractor Edward Snowden. The pretrial ruling dealt only with Adel Daoud’s case. He denies seeking to detonate a bomb outside a Chicago bar in 2012. …

A chief element of President Barack Obama’s attempt to overhaul U.S. surveillance will not work, leaders of Congress’ intelligence committees said Sunday, pushing back against the idea that the government should cede control of how Americans’ phone records are stored. Obama, under pressure to calm the controversy over government spying, said Friday he wants bulk phone data stored outside the government to reduce the risk that the records will be abused. The president said he will require a special judge’s advance approval before intelligence agencies can examine someone’s data and will force analysts to keep their searches closer to suspected...

US President Barack Obama has said he will not spy on EU leaders or conduct economic espionage, but will continue snooping on ordinary US and EU citizens.He made the pledge in a TV speech on Friday (17 January) in reaction to the Edward Snowden leaks. “I’ve made clear to the intelligence community that unless there is a compelling national security purpose, we will not monitor the communications of heads of state and government of our close friends and allies,” he said. “We do not collect intelligence to provide a competitive advantage to US companies or US commercial sectors,” he added....

Tightening the reins on the nation’s sweeping surveillance operations, President Barack Obama on Friday ordered new limits on the way intelligence officials access phone records from hundreds of millions of Americans—and moved toward eventually stripping the massive data collection from the government’s hands. But Obama’s highly anticipated intelligence recommendations left many key details unresolved, most notably who might take over as keeper of the vast trove of U.S. phone records. Final decisions on that and other major questions were left to the Justice Department and to intelligence agencies that oppose changing surveillance operations, and to a Congress that is divided...

President Barack Obama’s blueprint for overhauling the government’s sweeping surveillance program is just the starting point. The reality is few changes could happen quickly without unlikely agreements from a divided Congress and federal judges. The most contentious debate probably will be over the future of the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of telephone records from millions of Americans. In his highly anticipated speech on Friday, Obama is expected to back the idea of changing the program. But he’ll leave the specifics to Congress, according to U.S. officials briefed on the White House review. …

WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency has implanted software in nearly 100,000 computers around the world that allows the United States to conduct surveillance on those machines and can also create a digital highway for launching cyberattacks. While most of the software is inserted by gaining access to computer networks, the N.S.A. has increasingly made use of a secret technology that enables it to enter and alter data in computers even if they are not connected to the Internet, according to N.S.A. documents, computer experts and American officials. The technology, which has been used by the agency since at least...

United States President Barack Obama invited German Chancellor Angela Merkel to Washington on Wednesday, hoping to mend fences after a row provoked by revelations of U.S. eavesdropping on her cellphone, AFP reports. Obama called Merkel to wish her a speedy recovery after her recent skiing injury and invited her to visit at a “mutually agreeable time in the coming months,” the White House said in a statement quoted by the news agency. Merkel reacted furiously towards the end of 2013 to revelations that the National Security Agency had been listening in on her mobile, telling Obama in October that this...

A federal judge in New York has ruled that the National Security Agency's massive collection of American citizens' telephone records is both legal and useful. U.S. District Judge William Pauley wrote in his opinion issued Friday that the program "represents the government's counter-punch" to eliminate al-Qaeda's terror network. Pauley raised the specter of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and how the phone data-collection system could have helped investigators connect the dots before the attacks occurred. Pauley's decision appears to conflict with a ruling earlier this month by U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon, who granted a preliminary injunction against the...

A federal court should not permit five leading Internet companies to reveal how often they are ordered to turn over information about their customers in national security investigations, the government argued in papers released Wednesday. In a filing with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the government said that allowing the companies to release such detailed information “would be invaluable to our adversaries,” providing a clear picture of where the government’s surveillance efforts are directed and how its surveillance activities change over time, the court papers stated. Companies seeking to release the information about the orders received are Google Inc., Microsoft...

The US National Security Agency spied on civil rights leader Martin Luther King and boxer Muhammad Ali during the height of the Vietnam War protests, declassified documents reveal. According to the BBC, the documents show the NSA also tracked journalists from the New York Times and the Washington Post and two senators—Democrat Frank Church and Republican Howard Baker. …

The real problem with the Lifeline Program that provides free cell phones – commonly known as “Obamaphones” – to low-income individuals is not that it’s been abused, but that not enough low-income Latinos are using the subsidized phones, according to The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). “Probably about 30 to 35 percent of the people who qualify for Lifeline would be Latino, and yet only about 15 percent of the users of Lifeline are Latino,” Brent Wilkes, executive director of LULAC, said in a conference call Wednesday. When CNSNews asked for a comment on documented reports of fraud...

Stung by public unease about new details of spying by the National Security Agency, President Barack Obama selected a panel of advisers he described as independent experts to scrutinize the NSA’s surveillance programs to be sure they weren’t violating civil liberties and to restore Americans’ trust. But with just weeks remaining before its first deadline to report back to the White House, the review panel has effectively been operating as an arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA and all other U.S. spy efforts.The panel’s advisers work in offices on loan from the...

Full title: NSA, DEA, IRS Lie About Fact That Americans Are Routinely Spied On By Our Government: Time For A Special Prosecutor It seems that every day brings a new revelation about the scope of the NSA’s heretofore secret warrantless mass surveillance programs. And as we learn more, the picture becomes increasingly alarming. Last week we discovered that the NSA shares information with a division of the Drug Enforcement Agency called the Special Operations Division (SOD). The DEA uses the information in drug investigations. But it also gives NSA data out to other agencies – in particular, the Internal Revenue...

Until Wednesday morning, you'd probably never heard of something called "XKeyscore," a program that the National Security Agency itself describes as its "widest reaching" means of gathering data from across the Internet. According to reports shared by NSA leaker Edward Snowden with the Guardian, is that in addition to all of the other recent revelations about the NSA's surveillance programs, by using XKeyscore, "analysts can also search by name, telephone number, IP address, keywords, the language in which the Internet activity was conducted or the type of browser used." David Brown, who co-authored the recent book "Deep State: Inside the...

<p>While speaking at an annual conference of hacker and cybersecurity experts on Wednesday morning, National Security Agency head Gen. Keith Alexander was heckled by members of the audience for his agency’s surveillance operations and for his controversial testimony before Congress.</p>

Cheered like a rockstar when he passed through Berlin five years ago on his way to the White House, Barack Obama faces a cooler reception and tough questions about U.S. spying methods when he returns next week for talks with Angela Merkel and a speech at the Brandenburg Gate. Young, charismatic and inspirational, he represented hope, renewal and the clean break from George W. Bush that Europeans craved. "Germany meets the superstar" was the headline on the cover of Der Spiegel weekly before his visit during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign. His speech in Berlin's Tiergarten park attracted 200,000 fans...

In a climate of Internet campaigns to shun airport pat-downs and veteran pilots suing over their treatment by government screeners, some airports are considering another way to show dissatisfaction: Ditching TSA agents altogether. Federal law allows airports to opt for screeners from the private sector instead. The push is being led by a powerful Florida congressman who's a longtime critic of the Transportation Security Administration and counts among his campaign contributors some of the companies who might take the TSA's place. Furor over airline passenger checks has grown as more airports have installed scanners that produce digital images of the...