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The reward for the capture and return of Edward Snowden has been set at one billion US dollars

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The system has the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic in the hunt for foreign intelligence, including a wide array of communications by foreigners and Americans. In some cases, it retains the written content of emails sent between citizens within the U.S. and also filters domestic phone calls made with Internet technology, these people say.
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As another U.S. official puts it, the NSA is "not wallowing willy-nilly" through Americans' idle online chatter. "We want high-grade ore."

To achieve that, the programs use complex algorithms that, in effect, operate like filters placed over a stream with holes designed to let certain pieces of information flow through. After the 2001 terrorist attacks, NSA widened the holes to capture more information when the government broadened its definition of what constitutes "reasonable" collection, according to a former top intelligence official.

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The documents raise doubts about the reliability of Tor to protect human rights workers, dissidents and journalists who rely on anonymity to avoid threats to their safety and freedom in countries like Libya and Syria.

The authors of one NSA slide deck acknowledge that Tor’s users include “Dissidents: (Iran, China, etc.).� But their next bullet point described another Tor constituency: “Terrorists!�

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Fuck the NSA.

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Judge Richard Leon declared that the mass collection of so-called metadata probably violates the fourth amendment, relating to unreasonable searches and seizures, and was "almost Orwellian" in its scope.

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USIS - which had vetted former spy agency contractor Edward Snowden - filed at least 665,000 flawed background checks between March 2008 and September 2012, which was about 40 percent of total submissions, the Justice Department said in a court filing on Wednesday.

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The lawsuit is not about the firm's review of Alexis or Snowden, who is wanted by the U.S. government for leaking documents about the surveillance programs at the National Security Agency.

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Espionage is inherently disreputable: It involves stealing secrets.

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Snowdenistas have notably failed to explain why it is in the public interest to reveal how democracies spy on dictatorships or terrorists.

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The catastrophic damage done by Edward Snowden dwarfs the impact of Cold War traitors and defectors.

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Mr. Snowden's cheerleaders demand to know what right U.S. agencies have to bug and snoop. The answer is simple. America's spies (unlike those in most countries) are responsible to their elected leaders, and supervised by judges and lawmakers.

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The Government could have requested permission to present additional, potentially classified evidence in camera, but it chose not to do so. Although the Government has publicly asserted that the NSA's surveillance programs have prevented fifth-four terrorist attacks, no proof of that has been put before me.

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While Stone said the mass collection of telephone call records was a “logical program� from the NSA’s perspective, one question the White House panel was seeking to answer was whether it had actually stopped “any [terror attacks] that might have been really big.�

“We found none,� said Stone.

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They show the surveillance programme – codenamed Optic Nerve – saved one image every five minutes from randomly selected Yahoo webcam chats and stored them on agency databases.

This was partly to comply with human rights legislation, and also to avoid overloading GCHQ’s servers.

(GORDON @ Feb. 28 2014,13:20)

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So I have heard that pre-legal teens often look at each other naked on their webcams.  One wonders how much child porn the NSA is sitting on.

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If it turns out that the CIA was spying on the Senate committee that oversees the agency, it would be an outrageous violation of separation of powers.