Privacy

Edward Snowden, the former contractor for the National Security Agency who leaked classified documents regarding the agency's surveillance program, has apparently broken his silence for the first time since fleeing Hong Kong for Moscow eight days ago.

In a letter addressed to the Ecuadorian government, Snowden thanked Ecuador for helping arrange passage to Russia and said he remained committed to publishing information about the NSA's PRISM data collection program. Snowden, 30, has been charged by the U.S. government with espionage, theft, and conversion of government property. He has reportedly applied for asylum in Russia.

"I remain … Read more

The Washington Post published on Saturday a set of slides regarding PRISM, revealing more details about the National Security Agency's controversial surveillance program and how it operates.

The new slides, which come nearly a month after former NSA employee Edward Snowden leaked classified documents to the press about the program, appear to confirm that the NSA and FBI have the ability to perform real-time surveillance of e-mail and stored content.

The slides also seem to contradict denials from tech companies such as Google, Apple, Yahoo, and Microsoft about their level of participation in the program. The program "uses … Read more

Secret documents describing the National Security Agency's surveillance apparatus have highlighted vulnerabilities in outdated Web encryption used by Facebook and a handful of other U.S. companies.

Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden confirm that the NSA taps into fiber optic cables "upstream" from Internet companies and vacuums up e-mail and other data that "flows past" -- a security vulnerability that "https" Web encryption is intended to guard against.

But Facebook and a few other companies still rely on an encryption technique viewed as many years out of date, which cryptographers … Read more

The most secretive court in the nation, which has been criticized for authorizing domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency, has taken a tiny step toward openness in lawsuits brought by Google and Microsoft.

CNET has learned that Reggie Walton, the presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, told the Obama administration last week that -- barring any objections from the government -- he would take the unusual step of disclosing procedural information about the Internet companies' litigation.

The Department of Justice responded yesterday by saying it had no objections. Neither Google nor Microsoft's legal briefs "contain … Read more

Following Google's lead, Microsoft has asked a secretive U.S. surveillance court to lift a gag order prohibiting it from disclosing more information about government requests it receives for customer data.

The software giant cited the First Amendment in its nine-page filing last week with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, arguing that U.S. government restrictions on what it can disclose constitute a "content-based restriction on speech." The filing was made public Wednesday.

Google filed a similar motion with the court last week, arguing that it has "a right under the First Amendment to publish" … Read more

Revelations about the National Security Agency's surveillance abilities have highlighted shortcomings in many Internet companies' security practices that can expose users' confidential communications to government eavesdroppers.

Secret government files leaked by Edward Snowden outline a U.S. and U.K. surveillance apparatus that's able to vacuum up domestic and international data flows by the exabyte. One classified document describes "collection of communications on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past," and another refers to the NSA's network-based surveillance of Microsoft's Hotmail servers.

Most Internet companies, however, do not use an privacy-protective encryption technique … Read more

The Interactive Advertising Bureau, a group that represents hundreds of Internet advertisers, has attacked Mozilla's involvement in a Stanford Law School privacy project to judge whether individual Web sites can be trusted to set behavior-tracking browser cookies.

The IAB doesn't like the Cookie Clearninghouse, which Stanford's Center for Internet and Society and Mozilla announced on June 19. The project aims to rate individual to bring privacy ratings for browser cookies -- the small text files that Web site operators can store on people's computers. Cookies can be useful for remembering that you're logged into a … Read more

Google cannot be forced to remove "damaging" material from its search engine that was legally posted elsewhere, according to an adviser to the top court in Europe.

The senior adviser to the European Court of Justice (ECJ), whose job it is to present a public and impartial opinion on cases the court receives, also said there is no general "right to be forgotten" under existing EU data and privacy laws.

In an opinion published on Tuesday, advocate-general Niilo Jaaskinen said that Google cannot be considered the "controller" of personal data from other Web sites … Read more

Accusations of broad government surveillance have traveled across the pond. Britain's intelligence agency has reportedly been collecting and storing vast amounts of data from the world's telephone calls and Internet traffic -- and sharing that information with the National Security Agency.

Britain's Government Communications Headquarters secretly gained access to fiber-optic cables that carry the world's communications, reports the Guardian. The GCHQ taps into huge amounts of data from these cables and stores it for up to 30 days to be looked over by analysts from GCHQ and the NSA.

The Guardian reported Friday that documents shown … Read more