surveillance

Tumblr has a new blogger within its sphere: The U.S. Intelligence Community.

That's right, the umbrella organization that oversees government intelligence agencies, like the National Security Agency, the CIA, and FBI, has started to blog. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper penned a post on Wednesday making the announcement.

"The goal of IC ON THE RECORD is to provide the public with direct access to factual information related to the lawful foreign surveillance activities carried out by the Intelligence Community," Clapper wrote. "In addition to comprehensive explanations of the authorities under which the Intelligence Community … Read more

The National Security Agency exceeded its legal authority and broke agency rules thousands of times since it was granted broader powers in 2008, according to an internal agency audit obtained by The Washington Post.

Most violations involved unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the U.S., according to the documents, which were supplied to the newspaper by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The documents show infractions ranging from serious legal violations to typographical errors that resulted in unintended data collection, The Post reported.

The agency was not always forthcoming with the details of its transgressions, the Post found. … Read more

NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden began downloading documents about secret U.S. government surveillance programs while employed by Dell in April 2012, according to a Reuters report.

The former intelligence contractor began working at Dell in 2009 as a contractor at a National Security Agency facility in Japan. While employed at Dell, Snowden left an electronic trail that indicates he downloaded documents regarding electronic surveillance programs run by the NSA and Britain's Government Communications Headquarters, officials and sources close to the matter told Reuters.

Some of the documents Snowden reportedly accessed related to NSA data collection of Internet traffic and … Read more

Just hours after President Obama defended the National Security Agency's activities, the foreign surveillance agency released a document in which it claims to review only a small faction of Internet traffic on a daily basis.

In a seven-page paper released late Friday titled "The National Security Agency: Missions, Authorities, Oversight and Partnerships"(PDF), the agency asserts that the amount of data it collects from the global communications apparatus on a daily basis is comparable in size to a dime placed on a basketball court.

The National Security Agency created a "secret backdoor" so its massive databases could be searched for the contents of U.S. citizens' confidential phone calls and e-mail messages without a warrant, according to the latest classified documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

A report in the Guardian on Friday quoted Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee, as saying the secret rule offers a loophole allowing "warrantless searches for the phone calls or emails of law-abiding Americans."

That appears to confirm what Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, said in … Read more

U.S. President Barack Obama met with a number of tech figures Thursday to discuss the future of technology and its role in surveillance.

According to Politico, anonymous sources say the meeting was a closed-door affair, following a similar, off-the-record meeting between U.S. administrators, lobbyists and leading privacy campaigners. Both secretive meetings focused on the NSA controversy, as well as broader issues -- including the online tracking of consumer behavior and patterns.

Apple CEO Tim Cook, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson and Google computer scientist Vint Cerf were present at Thursday's gathering, according to the report. In … Read more

An encrypted e-mail service reportedly used by Edward Snowden is shutting down, presumably in response to an investigation of the NSA whistleblower's use of the service.

Ladar Levison, the owner of Lavabit, announced the move Thursday in a note posted to the service's home page. Although Levison's cryptic note doesn't mention Snowden by name, he does say that he's "been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly 10 years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit."

In nonspecific language, Levison … Read more

"At first, we thought it was Dog The Bounty Hunter and he'd just let himself go."

These were the angst-ridden words of Tim Lake, describing a lady who had come to his door.

She hadn't come to borrow sugar nor to discuss some errant dog droppings. No, his video surveillance system showed her picking up an Amazon box and walking away with a hurried gait.

Lake thought there was something wrong with this picture, as the Amazon box was intended for him.

I am grateful to Slothed.com for revealing CBS 5 Arizona's emotional report. … Read more

LAS VEGAS -- It used to be that the playful Defcon contest of "Spot the Fed" gave hackers and the government agents tracking them a chance interact in a less serious manner.

Hackers who found a government agent among the conference attendees would wear with pride T-shirts that read, "I spotted the Fed." The agent would be given a shirt that read, "I am the Fed." And by flipping the cat-and-mouse dynamic for at least one weekend a year, the two groups more or less came to a greater understanding of each other.

The … Read more