Snowden

The American Civil Liberties Union, among other organizations, will launch this week a campaign asking President Barack Obama to consider pardoning Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who revealed global surveillance programs run by the US.

Ashkan Soltani, former chief technologist for the Federal Trade Commission, was forced to leave a new White House job when his security clearance was denied. Many suspect his help in reporting on the Edward Snowden leaks to be the reason why.

Appearing on a telepresence device, former National Security Agency contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden talked cybersecurity and playfully taunted the US government, saying, “The FBI can’t arrest a robot.”

The National Security Agency will end its mass metadata surveillance program this weekend, two and a half years after Edward Snowden’s revelations. However, he NSA’s replacement “reasonable compromise” is far from being celebrated by privacy advocates.

Although the US government says an NSA program collecting email records of Americans was shut down in December 2011, it is likely the practice still continued, according to documents obtained by the New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act.

An ex-CIA director claims Edward Snowden should face the death penalty because he has French “blood on his hands.” Some experts, however, cast doubt on that claim, with one saying the Paris attacks are being used as a “good crisis” by those in power.

The NSA didn’t know it was already sitting on a “goldmine” of data on one of its targets until one of its analysts discovered it by “sheer luck,” according to an internal newsletter entry leaked by Edward Snowden.

The National Security Agency’s infamous XKEYSCORE program, revealed by leaker Edward Snowden, makes searching the world’s private communications as easy to use as Google, according to training documents published by the Intercept.

The French justice minister said she would not be surprised if, in light of the latest revelations about the NSA spying on country’s leaders, France offers political asylums to Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, as a “symbolic gesture.”