Russia will never hand NSA leaker Edward Snowden over to the U.S., Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday, but also unless Snowden "stops his work aimed at harming our American partners" he won't be allowed to stay in Russia. So... that's Sheremetyevo Airport for the foreseeable future, then?
The European Union reached out to the United States to respond to claims over the weekend that the U.S. bugged E.U. offices in the Unites States and accessed the internal computer networks of their biggest ally and trading partner.
The Guardian continues to expose the extent to which we are all beautiful tropical fish swimming in the electronic aquarium of the NSA's surveillance systems. According to a top-secret report by the NSA's inspector general obtained by the Guardian (presumably from Ed Snowden) the Obama Administration continued a Bush-era program that collected U.S. email records in bulk.
Some people say that Edward Snowden is a hero because the secret NSA spying program that he exposed was ripe for abuse. Other people say Edward Snowden is a villain, because the program seemed to be well-run and lawful. Both of these positions are grounded in fantasy. Nobody knows whether the government's power was abused; it's a secret. That's the problem. That's the point.
On Sunday morning, Edward Snowden boarded an Aeroflot flight in Hong Kong, landing in Moscow more than 13 hours later. We think. The truth is, no one's quite sure where the NSA leaker is—Moscow? Havana? Quito? Reykjavik? (He's not on Aeroflot Flight 180, we know that much.) But we can reconstruct his movements—and speculate where he's headed.
The National Security Agency and Silicon Valley are both after the same thing: You.
When the Guardian and Washington Post published their blockbuster NSA reports based on Ed Snowden's leaks, journalists lined up conga-style to congratulate them on the scoops. Not Cryptome. Instead, the secret-killing site blasted the Guardian and Post for only publishing 4 of the 41 slides that Snowden gave them about PRISM, the NSA's system for spying on the internet.
