The choice is simple: pardon him, or abandon him to the mercy of Trump. By Brian Beutler.

Yahoo Inc’s secret scanning of customer emails at the behest of a U.S. spy agency is part of a growing push by officials to loosen constitutional protections Americans have against arbitrary governmental searches, according to legal documents and people briefed on closed court hearings.

ACLU

In the summer of 1967, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara commissioned a group of thirty-six scholars to write a secret history of the Vietnam War. The project took a year and a half, ran to seven thousand pages, and filled forty-seven volumes. Only a handful of copies were made, and most were kept under lock and key in and around the Beltway. One set, however, ended up at the rand Corporation, in Santa Monica, where it was read, from start to finish, by a young analyst there named Daniel Ellsberg.

A new temporary exhibition in New York City offers an up-close look at the tools of the surveillance state—and how to fight them. By Joshua Kopstein.

Unless someone steps up to push this off course, the DOJ’s proposed changes to Rule 41 will become law December 1. That’s the key part: doing something. All that has to happen is nothing for the changes to become law. By Tim Cushing.

Edward Snowden's bid to guarantee that he would not be extradited to the US if he visited Norway has been rejected by the Norwegian supreme court. The former National Security Agency contractor filed the lawsuit in April, attempting to secure safe passage to Norway to pick up a free speech award. It had already been rejected by Oslo District court and an appeals court. Mr Snowden is a former NSA analyst who leaked secret US surveillance details three years ago.

In a big interview with the German media outlet Der Spiegel, President Obama was asked about his interest in pardoning Ed Snowden in response to the big campaign to get him pardoned. Obama's response was that he could not, since Snowden has not been convicted yet...

In a big interview with the German media outlet Der Spiegel, President Obama was asked about his interest in pardoning Ed Snowden in response to the big campaign to get him pardoned… By Mike Masnick.

He’s called for a “fundamental upgrade” to U.S. spying powers. By Kaveh Waddell.

The NSA has operated a top-secret surveillance program out of an iconic AT&T building in Manhattan, documents indicate. By Ryan Gallagher and Henrik Moltke.

Edward Snowden warned us about the abuses of our national security state. Now look who's in charge of it. By Graham Vyse.

While most eyes are focused on the presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, three major events prove how widespread, and dangerous, mass surveillance has become in the west. Standing alone, each event highlights exactly the severe threats which motivated Edward Snowden to blow his whistle; taken together, they constitute full-scale vindication of everything he’s done.

The Impact of Secrets and Dark Knowledge. By Richard Thieme.

US film director Oliver Stone on Thursday accused President Barack Obama's administration of implementing a surveillance system worse than that of the feared Stasi secret police in East Germany. Speaking at the San Sebastian film festival in northern Spain, where he presented his film "Snowden," Stone said many in the US had grown disillusioned with a president they once saw as "a man of great integrity."

Edward Snowden has made his feelings known about Theresa May, describing the British Prime Minister as “a sort of Darth Vader in the United Kingdom”. The exiled NSA whistleblower compared Ms May to one of film's most notorious film villains over her Investigatory Powers Bill currently undergoing legislative scrutiny.

As Barack Obama’s second term comes to an end, an increasingly loud chorus of voices are calling for a dramatic final presidential act: the pardoning of..

Bernie Sanders leads a chorus of prominent public figures calling for clemency, a plea agreement or, in several cases, a full pardon for the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. Writing in the Guardian, the runner-up in the race to become Democratic presidential candidate argues that Snowden helped to educate the American public about how the NSA violated the constitutional rights of citizens with its mass surveillance program.

The famed director of “JFK” and “Wall Street” talks about his new film, “Snowden,” about Edward Snowden the man, the totalitarian character of “surveillance capitalism” and Russian President Vladimir Putin. You portray Edward Snowden in your film not as a traitor, but as an information age patriot defending American citizens from their own intelligence agencies. At one point in the film, Snowden and his colleagues are shocked to learn that the incidence of surveillance on Americans was greater than on America’s adversaries, the Chinese and Russians.

The US whistleblower Edward Snowden has attacked his Russian protectors by criticising the Kremlin’s human rights record and suggesting that its officials have been involved in hacks on US security networks.