Security News
Interesting article about the Snowden documents, including comments from former Guardian editor Ewen MacAskill. As far as he knows, a copy of the documents is still locked in the New York Times office.
Jake Appelbaum's PhD thesis contains several new revelations from the classified NSA documents provided to journalists by Edward Snowden. Kind of amazing that that all happened ten years ago.
Feature The world got a first glimpse into the US government's far-reaching surveillance of American citizens' communications - namely, their Verizon telephone calls - 10 years ago this week when Edward Snowden's initial leaks hit the press. Wyden was one of two US senators who had sounded the alarm about the Obama administration's surveillance programs even before the Snowden leaks came to light.
In 2013 and 2014, I wrote extensively about new revelations regarding NSA surveillance based on the documents provided by Edward Snowden. He had been working on the Edward Snowden archive for a couple of months, and had a pile of more technical documents that he wanted help interpreting.
Someone hacked the Ecuadorian embassy in Moscow and found a document related to Ecuador's 2013 efforts to bring Edward Snowden there. If you remember, Snowden was traveling from Hong Kong to somewhere when the US revoked his passport, stranding him in Russia.
Surveillance laws permitting GCHQ to operate its Tempora dragnet mass surveillance system broke the law, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled. "The Court considers that, when viewed as a whole, the section 8(4) regime, despite its safeguards... did not contain sufficient 'end-to-end' safeguards to provide adequate and effective guarantees against arbitrariness and the risk of abuse," ruled the European Court of Human Rights's Grand Chamber.
In 1965, Gordon Moore published a short informal paper, Cramming more components onto integrated circuits. Based on not much more but these few data points and his knowledge of silicon chip development - he was head of R&D at Fairchild Semiconductors, the company that was to seed Silicon Valley - he said that for the next decade, component counts by area could double every year.
Fugitive US whistleblower Edward Snowden has been granted permanent residency in Russia, his lawyer said on Thursday. Snowden, the former US intelligence contractor who revealed in 2013 that the US government was spying on its citizens, has been living in exile in Russia since the revelations.
The US government's Department of Justice has won its multi-million-dollar claim to Edward Snowden's Permanent Record book royalties as well as any future related earnings. A federal district court in eastern Virginia this week ruled that Uncle Sam was entitled to the proceeds of Snowden's bestseller, an estimated $5.2m, and "Any further monies, royalties, or other financial advantages derived by Snowden from Permanent Record." It can also grab Snowden's appearance fees from 56 speeches, thought to exceed $1m. The court came to this conclusion after deciding Snowden broke his non-disclosure agreements with the NSA and CIA. It noted the super-leaker did not offer up his book for a review by official censors nor did he clear speeches on intelligence matters with the US government as required by his employment contract from the time he worked for Uncle Sam.
It's been a long time coming, and while some might view the decision as a slap for officials that defended the practice, the three-judge panel said the part played by the NSA programme wasn't sufficient to undermine the convictions of four individuals for conspiring to send funds to Somalia in support of a terrorist group. Snowden made public the existence of the NSA data collection programmes in June 2013, and by June 2015 US Congress had passed the USA FREEDOM Act, "Which effectively ended the NSA's bulk telephony metadata collection program," according to the panel.