The NSA was built to spy, with the uncomfortable question being “on whom?” The agency, long a background player in paranoid cinema like 1998's Enemy of the State, re-entered the public consciousness in 2013 in a big way with revelations from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that the vast surveillance architecture of the NSA was spying on American citizens. Since then, there have been many more revelations from the documents Snowden lifted when he fled the agency and the country. The latest, explored in depth at The Intercept, is this: The NSA, as well as Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ, the NSA's British counterpart), covertly captured video images from Israeli drones. These images also publicly confirm a long-suspected truth, that Israel deployed armed drones.
It's been two years since the first revelations from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, and there are still new details in his trove of stolen secrets. Many of the revelations have concerned the bulk data collection of data done by the American agency, whose job it is to monitor electronic communications.
In the documentary film "Citizenfour" by Laura Poitras, it’s revealed that Edward Snowden’s longtime girlfriend Lindsay Mills also left the United States and joined Snowden in Russia. Cheekily, Vogue suggests a trio of outfits for Mills, to match both the climate and the need for discretion that comes with proximity to the source of a major intelligence leak.
About a year ago, Popular Science introduced a robot into the office (the fancy Park Ave New York office, that is - Australian Ed). One of the many virtues of working at a magazine such as ours is that we’re free to test all sorts of cool stuff. So we called the guys at Suitable Technologies and asked them to send us a BeamPro, the telepresence robot made famous by Edward Snowden (no doubt, he got the idea from us).
In the high desert near Bluffdale, Utah, there lurks a creature made entirely of zeroes and ones. Called "MonsterMind", the project is an automated cyber weapon, perched atop the data flows into the National Security Agency's Mission Data Repository. According to recent revelations from former government contractor and NSA leaker Edward Snowden, Monstermind is both tremendously powerful and easily fooled. Here's the skinny on the biggest revelation from Wired's recent profile of Snowden. Author James Bamford writes:
The National Security Agency, still under the microscope because of leaks from former employee Edward Snowden, has beenstraddling the line between terrifying digital panoptican and almost comically inept government institution. Now, in the latter category: a report that the NSA infiltrated the dark world of online gaming.
