Surely Fox News must be loving this, no disrespect to Vile Rat but isn't this a bigger, actual scandal to sink their teeth into?

Also Tentacles like a boss!

I wonder what we're building in conjunction with our overseas allies?

Enjoying your free gmail accounts boys and girls?

Bought my first Android phone 2 days ago.

*Facepalm*

At least you're not an iTard who paid through the nose to get snooped on

Wow, MSNBC are badmouthing Obama.

Ain't it cute it happened right as John Oliver took over the Daily Show

James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, just released a letter copping to and essentially declassifying the program.

No worries though -- he says there's a secret court that protects us and we can trust the government not to abuse the power.

And he said the whistleblower is a real douchebag for telling us.

Phew!

I feel better now.

SCANDAL. OVER.

I just have to say that governments were initially created as the common man can not be trusted either. Just saying. The problems we have with government are just large and obvious examples of the inherent flaws of the human condition.

Well it appears that they've admitted PRISM exists - Google et al are still claiming ignorance, but its clearly bullshit from them.

So all that means is that if you live outside the USA then don't use the services as the NSA is legally monitoring you.

Can't see anyone wearing google glass being very welcome anywhere........

Legal my ******* arse, I don't recall Parliament passing a bill legalising it.

I hope that the investigations over here close down the subsidiaries of corporations in the UK taking part in such actions, or a forceful demerger. It's highly illegal, might even be treasonous to do this under the law.

For the record I am quite miffed at this, and the above is my impulsive reaction.

"America, the land of the free hurr durr".

I didn't ask for this...

I hope the EU crushes this through market regulation.

This is being done via corporations operating subsidiaries in the EU member states for some of the data sourced according to the Telegraph.

Assuming that is correct, then yes the EU has jurisdiction and can issue heavy fines, hopefully crippling in this case for not acting in the interests of its member states. See what happened with Microsoft for including a browser in its OS or Intel for bribery.

EU has balls when it comes to making foreign corporations pay for anticompetitive practices, and they've been circling Google for a while now...

I would take you more seriously if you used capital letters and punctuation for the record.

But hey, EU v Intel 2009, EU v Microsoft..

There is a balance between safety and liberty, and you will rarely find two people who agree on where the correct balance lies.

People: "Oh Government, protect us from evildoers. If you don't, we'll vote you out."

Government: "OK"

People, "Why are you doing surveillance and collecting SIGINT????!"

You know what? This is all a fuss about nothing.

The US, UK, Australia and a few other Anglo-Saxon nations share something the media call "ECHELON", which is actually just SIGINT. It was used extensively during the cold war. We have quite a few listening stations here in the UK. It's not a surprise to me that the NSA, MI5 and everyone else is listening in to everyone's communications.

The difference today is that there's so much SIGINT, you really can't do it unless you record everything and then mine it later.

Here's where I stand:

(1) I have no problem with Intelligence Services of the Anglosphere listening to and recording my data BUT, they should do it under supervision of appropriate committees, chaired by democratically elected representatives.

(2) The Police should only have access to it by court order.

(3) Local Councils/apparatchiks should under no circumstances ever have access to it.

My view .

Wait what? Does that mean people will no longer call me a paranoid crackpot if i tell them it's not a good idea to upload their whole life to some cloud storage? For how long? A Week?

...when was the last time EU put anyone in prison for anti competitive practices ...

yes there is a server farm, yes it's underground, no you aren't important enough to know about it, no you won't care five minutes from now, yes it is owned by an agency with a three letter identifier, plenty of people who are not-you already know about it, you're making yourself look bad

surely, you didn't think this didn't exist.

Wait what? Does that mean people will no longer call me a paranoid crackpot if i tell them it's not a good idea to upload their whole life to some cloud storage? For how long? A Week?

protip: it detects keywords in your speech and text.

Canada and new zealand

People need to watch the full interview with Edward Snowden here.

This guy is not a crazy. Or a partisan. He's not some bitter traitor like Bradley Manning. He warns about exactly the concern I had earlier in the thread.

If I were him, I would have retained my honour, not betrayed my country, left my job to satisfy my sense of morality and lobbied for changes to law without giving the entire game away. Like Assange, this guy is just an attention seeker who wants everyone to know he's some kind of a big shot.

The most surprising thing that comes from this is the inadequacy of the NSA's psychological profiling of the people it employs.

This guy had access to an absolutely enormous amount of material. If he wanted to do a Bradley Manning, he could have done it by one or two orders of magnitude.

I am not ordinarily one to be politically proactive or a conspiracy theorist, but the existence of such a program is worrying as it now stands, how deep does the rabbit hole go? Wrapping my head around the data so far it doesn't seem as bad as was first indicated, but still somewhat unsettling.

Frankly I could care less what the US does to spy on its own citizens, I'm concerned about actions that may be being done in the UK with GCHQ's involvement.

I am not ordinarily one to be politically proactive or a conspiracy theorist, but the existence of such a program is worrying as it now stands, how deep does the rabbit hole go? Wrapping my head around the data so far it doesn't seem as bad as was first indicated, but still somewhat unsettling.

If I were him, I would have retained my honour, not betrayed my country, left my job to satisfy my sense of morality and lobbied for changes to law without giving the entire game away.

That doesn't mean he isn't a douche.

What's going to happen to the Congressman he contacts? They're going to get a phone call from the NSA letting them know they have the receipt of the Thai ladyboy locked away in their basement.

theres nothing new in this ...its been going on for ages I should know I worked for a company that was involved in doing it .
linky for those that don't believe .racal instruments

The anger is growing in the political circles this side of the Atlantic, Angela Merkel is from East Germany and we can expect her to take a certain perspective to this.

Merkel saw the NSA spy heat map. On this map, Germany has the first place among all european countries. It's also an open secret that agencies steal know how from foreign companies. You can imagine what it is all about. Btw :-D

British journalist Duncan Campbell and New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager asserted in the 1990s that the United States was exploiting ECHELON traffic for industrial espionage, rather than military and diplomatic purposes.[10] Examples alleged by the journalists include the gear-less wind turbine technology designed by the German firm Enercon[5][11] and the speech technology developed by the Belgian firm Lernout & Hauspie.[12] An article in the US newspaper Baltimore Sun reported in 1995 that European aerospace company Airbus lost a $6 billion contract with Saudi Arabia in 1994 after the US National Security Agency reported that Airbus officials had been bribing Saudi officials to secure the contract.[13][14]

In 2001, the Temporary Committee on the ECHELON Interception System recommended to the European Parliament that citizens of member states routinely use cryptography in their communications to protect their privacy, because economic espionage with ECHELON has been conducted by the US intelligence agencies.[5]

Merkel saw the NSA spy heat map. On this map, Germany has the first place among all european countries. It's also an open secret that agencies steal know how from foreign companies. You can imagine what it is all about. Btw :-D

When did this Snowden guy say he was thinking of running to Russia?

A Russian official said, unsolicited with no response, that they'd consider an asylum request if they received one.

but really, chances are he's delusional. as in, he thinks of himself as an irl Ben Affleck in Hunt for Red October.

I had only heard rumors back in 2009 that 3rd Intelligence Battalion on Okinawa, Japan and IPAC were being told to record all calls made my Marines, sailors, and civilians on the base for storage. I guess now it's true...

Blah blah blah I want the government to read all my emails, listen to all my phone calls, and monitor all my web activity, so I'm just going to make this about trashing the whistleblower blah blah...

Strange how a delusional man has attracted the full attention of the American surveillance state.

We got ourselves a real armchair profiler here. As well as an armchair psychologist. And an armchair psychic who knows every thought that guy ever thought. Hell, I'll bet you know what Snowden was thinking before he even thunk it.

man, I want to make a difference. when's the next occupy rally?

man, I want to make a difference. when's the next occupy rally?

- Aside from those backdoors the NSA has at US companies' servers, the NSA also hacks into network backbones, giving them access to "hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one".

The US is currently diplomatically "bullying" Hong Kong to have him extradited.

PRISM has been used for years to hack and spy on people and institutions in China (and yet, all we hear is the US government constantly whining about the Chinese doing likewise).

There's a march being organized in Hong Kong in support of Snowden, and not having him extradited to the US.

Really, you are an utter, utter, utter, fool Malaclypse Muscaria.

How hilarious that this gigantic douche has betrayed his own country, friends, girlfriend, family over what he says is a civil liberties issue and is thinking of running to [insert any country here, including USA], where journalists who uncover corruption are routinely murdered by gunmen on motorbikes.

If he came to France he would probably be given a medal for services to the public interest.

The thing that makes me worried is that running around in their nappies somewhere is the next Prime Minister or President in 40 years. How much blackmail material could the NSA build on them if they wanted to with this kind of a system, assume we'll have voice recognition software to go back through recorded conversations and mine that.

Hope Hong Kong sticks to their guns and keeps him safe.

Also Shia LaBeouf in 2008. Wow.

If he came to France he would probably be given a medal for services to the public interest.

I know I have been monitored. And I am pretty sure I am on a 'list'. I have been pulled to the side, frisked, searched, and hassled every time I have flown since well before 911. I will say since about 1998. Interesting as that is about the time I used the internet to look up the Anarchist's Cookbook. Dooh!

Seems the public mood is now towards backing strong data protection acts in Europe. The result would effectively be companies working in the US forced to hand over data to the NSA, and be denied access to the EU. Or vice versa, support privacy and be denied access to the US market.

"nobody cares about your business."

I remember this story, the snappy young rebels are armed by the CIA to fight their oppressors. They then win the war with American help and stew for a while before attacking those that provided for them before.

This will not end well....

"Thanks to everyone for their support, and remember that just because you are not the target of a surveillance program does not make it okay. The US Person / foreigner distinction is not a reasonable substitute for individualized suspicion, and is only applied to improve support for the program. This is the precise reason that NSA provides Congress with a special immunity to its surveillance."

Now seems as good a time as any to don the tinfoil hat and wonder if this type of mass surveillance has ever been used to persuade powerful people to go along with bad ideas.

I find it sad and slightly amusing that Americans outrage at certain things, and then just end up shrugging it off saying "hey they've done worse" or "this has been going on for year now its official so what"

being stripped of all of your privacy slowly but surly for the past 100 years, seems ot have gone a bit nuts in the past 10 years thanks to evil computers and dah internetz