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Spiegel Online
The American intelligence director and the White House have finally confirmed what insiders have long known: The Obama administration is spying on the entire world. Politicians in Germany are demanding answers.South of Utah's Great Salt Lake, the National Security Agency (NSA), a United States foreign intelligence service, keeps watch over one of its most expensive secrets. Here, on 100,000 square meters (1,100,000 square feet) near the US military's Camp Williams, the NSA is constructing enormous buildings to house superfast computers. All together, the project will cost around $2 billion (€1.5 billion) and the computers will be capable of storing a gigantic volume of data, at least 5 billion gigabytes. The energy needed to power the cooling system for the servers alone will cost $40 million a year.
Reuters
Britain on Monday dismissed as "baseless" accusations that security agencies had been circumventing British law by using information gathered on British citizens by PRISM, a secret U.S. eavesdropping program.Prime Minister David Cameron's government has been under pressure from the opposition and the media to reassure the public after U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked details of PRISM last week.
His disclosure lifted the lid on what he said was a vast surveillance system that stretched across the world, vacuuming up emails, electronic communications and phone data - including that of some Britons- that leaked documents showed was sometimes handed over to Britain's security services.
The Guardian
White House refers Snowden's case to Justice Department while Republicans in Congress call for whistleblower's extraditionWashington was struggling to contain one of the most explosive national security leaks in US history on Monday as public criticism grew of the sweeping surveillance state revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Political opinion was split with some members of Congress calling for the immediate extradition of a man they consider a "defector", but other senior politicians on both parties questioning whether US surveillance practices had gone too far.
Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst who revealed secrets of the Vietnam war through the so-called Pentagon Papers in 1971, described Snowden's leak as even more important and perhaps the most significant leak in American history.
In London, the British foreign secretary William Hague was forced to defend the UK's use of intelligence gathered by the US, and other European leaders also voiced concern.
Bloomberg
Edward Snowden, the ex-CIA worker who revealed a secret U.S. electronic surveillance program, says he likes Hong Kong’s independence and free speech. He may be about to learn about its extradition deal with the U.S.The 29-year-old American, a former technical assistant for the Central Intelligence Agency, provided the information to journalists and revealed his identity voluntarily, according to a video interview posted on the website of the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper. Snowden, an employee of defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp (BAH)., has been working at the National Security Agency for the past four years for various contractors, according to reports by the Guardian and the Washington Post, which said he provided them with documents.
NPR
Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old former CIA technical assistant who has stepped forward to say he's the source of explosive leaks about government surveillance programs was among "thousands upon thousands" of such analysts hired to manage and sift through "huge amounts of data," NPR's Tom Gjelten said Monday on Morning Edition.He's "what we'd normally call a geek," Tom added.
Indeed, The Guardian on Monday shares more about the young man who it says was behind last week's leaks concerning National Security Agency programs that sweep up data on phone calls and Internet activity. It paints a portrait of a mediocre student with a GED degree who joined the Army in 2003, but was discharged after breaking his legs in a training accident. Snowden says he later wound up working with the CIA and then a contractor because he's skilled at computer programming.
According to the Guardian, "by 2007, the CIA stationed him with diplomatic cover in Geneva, Switzerland. His responsibility for maintaining computer network security meant he had clearance to access a wide array of classified documents."