Investigative journalist and documentary maker James Bamford was among the first to uncover the secrets of the US National Security Agency (NSA) and its global surveillance. By Bill Goodwin.

Edward Snowden has responded to reports the CIA inspector general’s office “mistakenly” destroyed its only copy of a comprehensive Senate 'torture report' with a stinging rebuttal: “When the CIA destroys something, it's never a mistake.” An intelligence agency was quoted by Yahoo News as saying CIA inspector general officials deleted an uploaded computer file containing the report, before "inadvertently" destroying a disk with the document on it.

Edward Snowden has called for a complete overhaul of US whistleblower protections after a new source from deep inside the Pentagon came forward with a startling account of how the system became a “trap” for those seeking to expose wrongdoing. The account of John Crane, a former senior Pentagon investigator, appears to undermine Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and other major establishment figures who argue that there were established routes for Snowden other than leaking to the media.

In the years since ex-CIA employee Edward Snowden exposed the federal government's secret surveillance of the American public, young women around the globe have, in turn, exposed themselves to him. These lone lusters have taken to the internet, sending off their deepest desires on Twitter like love letters tied to the feet of modern-day carrier pigeons.

When it comes to civil liberties, Obama has made grievous mistakes. To salvage his reputation, he should exonerate the two greatest whistleblowers of our age. As he wraps up his presidency, it’s time for Barack Obama to seriously consider pardoning whistleblowers Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. Last week, Manning marked her six-year anniversary of being behind bars. She’s now served more time than anyone who has leaked information to a reporter in history – and still has almost three decades to go on her sentence.

On the morning of May 29, 2014, an overcast Thursday in Washington, DC, the general counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Robert Litt, wrote an email to high-level officials at the National Security Agency and the White House. Snowden's leaks had first come to light the previous June, when the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald and the Washington Post's Barton Gellman published stories based on highly classified documents provided to them by the former NSA contractor. Now Snowden, who had been demonized by the NSA and the Obama administration for the past year...

Three years ago today, the world got powerful confirmation that the NSA was spying on the digital lives of hundreds of millions of innocent people. It started with a secret order written by the FISA court authorizing the mass surveillance of Verizon Business telephone records—an order that members of Congress quickly confirmed was similar to orders that had been issued every 3 months for years. Over the next year, we saw a steady drumbeat of damning evidence, creating a detailed, horrifying picture of an intelligence agency unrestrained by Congress and shielded from public oversight by a broken classification system.

Russian spy-watcher Andrei Soldatov on Snowden’s strange behavior in Russia, the Nemtsov assassination, and signs of a power struggle in Putin’s inner circle.

Whistleblower Edward Snowden has criticized Russia's new anti-terrorist legislation draft that’s related to communications security. He stressed that the bill endangers liberty “without improving security. The former CIA employee, now residing in Russia as a temporary asylum holder, spoke against the legislation, which is part of a package of anti-terrorism bills prepared by a group of lawmakers headed by Chair of the State Duma Committee for Security Irina Yarovaya. Having called it a "Big Brother law," Snowden tweeted that it's "an unworkable, unjustifiable violation of rights that should never be signed."

Edward Snowden lay on his back in the rear of a Ford Escape, hidden from view and momentarily unconscious, as I drove him to the Whitney museum one recent morning to meet some friends from the art world. Along West Street, clotted with traffic near the memorial pools of the World Trade Center, a computerized voice from my iPhone issued directions via the GPS satellites above. Snowden’s lawyer, Ben Wizner of the American Civil Liberties Union, was sitting shotgun, chattily recapping his client’s recent activities.

Whistleblower and press freedom activist Edward Snowden has condemned a new law signed on Thursday by Vladimir Putin, saying it's a “dark day for Russia”. The new anti-terror legislation forces telephone carriers and internet providers to store the private communications of their customers – and turn them over to the government on request. “Putin has signed a repressive new law that violates not only human rights, but common sense. Dark day for Russia,” he wrote on Twitter.

This work aims to give journalists the tools to know when their smart phones are tracking or disclosing their location when the devices are supposed to be in airplane mode.

Edward Snowden wants you to know at all times whether the NSA is keeping tabs on your iPhone. Along with Andrew Huang, his coauthor and fellow hacker, Snowden presented his research on phone "hardware introspection" at MIT, which aims to give users the ability to see whether their phone is sending out secret signals to an intelligence agency. "This work aims to give journalists the tools to know when their smart phones are tracking or disclosing their location when the devices are supposed to be in airplane mode," the pair wrote in their technical paper.

New information made available by Edward Snowden reveals that Skype's turning over video and audio information to the NSA has skyrocketed in the past year, by a factor of three. Given that Skype already helps the Chinese government snoop on its citizens, this makes Skype one of the world's biggest privacy invaders. The information about Skype was published yesterday by the Guardian, in a report that details just how closely Microsoft has collaborated with NSA and other U.S. intelligence services via the Prism program.

A shadowy GCHQ unit used several Twitter accounts to try to influence protests in Iran and across the region since 2009. By Mustafa Al-Bassam.

The tall, lanky American dressed in all black looked familiar. But Ajith, a 44-year-old Sri Lankan refugee seeking asylum in Hong Kong figured the nervous-looking man with the red-rimmed eyes fidgeting in the darkness outside the United Nations building in the Tsim Sha Tsui district of Kowloon was a U.S. army dodger. Summoned by his immigration lawyer in the late evening of June 10, 2013, Ajith (last names of the refugees in this story have been withheld), a former soldier in...

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.

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.

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.

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..