Since the 1970s, spy agencies have been feeding police forces tips about who to arrest and where to look for evidence, despite the illegality of their practicing surveillance within the USA. Read the rest

In cryptographic and security circles, the "evil maid" problem describes a class of attacks in which a piece of unguarded hardware, is tampered with by someone who gains physical access to it: for example, a hotel chambermaid who can access your laptop while you're out of the room. Read the rest

Paul Brown writes, "The FSFE's 'Public Money? Public Code!' campaign wants to convince lawmakers that software created with public funds should be made available to the public under Free Software licences. Read the rest

In July 2016, Andrew "bunnie" Huang and Edward Snowden presented their research on journalist-friendly mobile surveillance resistance at the first MIT Media Lab Forbidden Research conference; a little over a year later, they have published an extensive scholarly paper laying out the problems of detecting and interdicting malware in a mobile device, and presenting a gorgeously engineered hardware overlay that can be installed in an Iphone to physically monitor the networking components and report on their activity via a screen on a slim external case. Read the rest

Journalism After Snowden: The Future of the Free Press in the Surveillance State is a new essay collection from Columbia Journalism Review Books with contributions from Ed Snowden, Alan Rusbridger (former editor-in-chief of The Guardian); Jill Abramson (former New York Times executive editor; Glenn Greenwald, Steve Coll (Dean of Columbia Graduate School of Journalism), Clay Shirky, Cass Sunstein, and Julia Angwin. Read the rest

It's been two years since the net came together to raise funds to support Werner Koch, who maintains the absolutely vital GnuPG email encryption system, used daily by millions to protect the privacy and integrity of their email. Read the rest

I have a column in today's International Business Times: Unchecked Surveillance Technology Is Leading Us Towards Totalitarianism, where I discuss this week's NYPL event with Edward Snowden and how mass surveillance connects to the themes in my novel Walkaway. Read the rest

Last night, the whistleblower Edward Snowden and appeard on stage at the New York Public Library's LIVE from the NYPL series, to discuss my novel Walkaway. Read the rest

I'm on the US tour for my new novel Walkaway (I'll be at DC's Politics and Prose tonight), and tomorrow, I'm doing a sold-out appearance with Edward Snowden onstage at the New York Public Library; although the event is packed, I've just learned that there will be a free livestream starting at 7PM Eastern. Read the rest

Two of the NSA's mass surveillance programs revealed by Edward Snowden are Prism (which give the NSA "bulk data" access to the servers of Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others) and Upstream (through which the NSA taps the internet's fiber optic backbones). Both are possible because of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which expires this year. Read the rest

I'm touring 20 US cities (plus dates in Canada and the UK!) with my forthcoming novel Walkaway; the full tour hasn't been announced yet, but I'm delighted to reveal that the NYC stop on May 3 will be at the New York Public Library, where my interlocutor will be the whistleblower Edward Snowden. Tickets are $10-25! (Reminder: there are also signed first-edition hardcovers available for pre-order in the USA and UK). Read the rest

U.S. intelligence officials say Russia 'is considering' sending Edward Snowden back to the United States as a "gift" to President Donald Trump, who has consistently referred to the NSA leaker as a "spy" and a "traitor" for whom the death penalty would be appropriate punishment. Read the rest

In 2013, Lavabit -- famous for being the privacy-oriented email service chosen by Edward Snowden to make contact with journalists while he was contracting for the NSA -- shut down under mysterious, abrupt circumstances, leaving 410,000 users wondering what had just happened to their email addresses. Read the rest

Recent surveillance laws in Germany, France and the UK require online service providers to store (undoubtedly leaky and infinitely toxic) databases of everything you do online, and allow government agencies to raid these databases without accountability or meaningful oversight). Read the rest

Malcolm Gladwell has an article in this month's New Yorker that dismisses Edward Snowden's claims to legitimacy and legal protection, while elevating Daniel Ellsberg's Pentagon Papers breach to an act of heroism; Gladwell sets out criteria for legitimate whistleblowing that treats Snowden as a "radicalized hacker" and Ellsberg as a "good leaker," and says that Snowden should have gone through official channels, rather than disclosing to journalists. Read the rest

Documentarians and news-gatherers who record sensitive material from confidential sources live in terror of having their cameras seized and their storage-cards plundered by law-enforcement; they struggle to remember to immediately transfer their files to encrypted laptop storage and wipe their cards while dodging bombs in conflict zones, or simply to remember to have robotically perfect operational security while they are trying to get a movie made. Read the rest

Edward Snowden's Periscope interview with Jack Dorsey -- hosted by the Pardon Snowden campaign ranged over a lot of territory, including the special problems of metadata surveillance (metadata can be "more intrusive" than content "because it can be understood at scale"); asymmetry in privacy (where "an increasing imbalance of power" arises between citizens, with no privacy, and officials with all the privacy: "We can't even see their tax-returns"); the problems of relying on the rule of law in a "global context" where surveillance crosses borders and jurisdictions; and fake news, which Snowden thinks can't be solved by asking Google to be a "referee" but rather when "We talk and we share and we point out what is true." Read the rest