The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, a White House watchdog group that condemned the Obama administration's phone surveillance program earlier this year, has released another report - and civil liberties groups aren't happy about it. The report took on Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which the NSA, CIA, and FBI have used to justify collecting the contents of emails and other electronic communications from web services or directly through internet backbone cables. It's the rule that governs PRISM, one of the first surveillance systems to be revealed by Edward Snowden. According to the board, though, it's …

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President Barack Obama has officially announced his plan to reform the National Security Agency's collection of phone records. Under his new proposal, the agency would no longer keep a database holding a large percentage of all American call records. Instead, phone companies like AT&T and Verizon would keep them for the same length of time they do now, and the government would submit requests for individual numbers after getting approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Phone companies, for their part, would have to provide "technical assistance" in order to make sure that the government could easily search for and collect i …

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The Obama administration has been presented with four wide-ranging options on how to reform the National Security Agency's (NSA) phone data collection program - including doing away with it altogether - according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. Citing officials close to the matter, the Journal reports that intelligence officials presented the options ahead of the March 28th deadline that President Barack Obama set forth in a speech about NSA reform earlier this year.

One proposal would be to put phone metadata collection under the purview of US telecommunications companies. Under this option, the NSA would inform the companies of …

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Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has weathered a firestorm of criticism in the months since Edward Snowden leaked documents detailing the NSA's bulk surveillance activity. Since then, he has declassified numerous documents as a means of showing transparency on the part of the government. However, in an interview with The Daily Beast, Clapper goes so far as to say that had the agency been transparent about data collection from the beginning, the issue would not have exploded into a scandal.

NSA mass surveillance is like "fire insurance," says Clapper

In Clapper's view, Americans would have welcomed the surveillance that falls u …

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The ongoing revelations about the extent of NSA data collection are causing other countries to tighten up their security and keep their citizens' data private. Germany in particular has been talking about keeping its internet traffic and email messages private within the country for some time, and now the country is planning to work with France to help build a network throughout Europe that keeps data away from the United States. According to Reuters, German Chancellor Angela Merkel (pictured above) is planning to discuss a European communication network that'll keep internet traffic away from the US with French President Francois Hollande w …

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The secret FISA court has approved two of President Barack Obama's proposed changes to how the NSA can use its collection of American phone records. While many of Obama's suggestions will take months to implement, if they go into effect at all, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper wrote yesterday that the court had agreed to two immediate limits. Except in cases of "true emergency," every use of the database - which includes metadata like calling history for virtually all American phone numbers - will now have to be approved beforehand by the FISA court on the basis of a reasonable, articulable suspicion that the search criteria i …

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President Obama will nominate Vice Admiral Michael Rogers as the new director of the National Security Agency and the chief of US Cyber Command. Throughout his over 30 years with the Navy, Rogers has worked extensively in cryptology, and since 2011 has been commander of the US Fleet Cyber Command. He will succeed General Keith Alexander, who's planning to step down this spring.

"Today, [cyberspace] is a primary warfare domain of equal importance."

Rogers would be taking over both the incredible cyber power and the widespread surveillance controversies overseen by his predecessor. He's been rumored to take over for several months now, with a nu …

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Three days before President Barack Obama will allegedly announce major changes to the NSA's surveillance programs, The New York Times has a story addressing one particularly controversial practice: intercepting laptops purchased online to insert bugs that can phone home - or even give remote access - to the US government. According to the Times, not only does that practice take place, but the bugs are now installed in nearly 100,000 computers around the world as part of a program code-named Quantum. However, the publication's government sources say they aren't being used inside the United States, but rather to spy on allleged Chinese and Rus …

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