NSA Leak

NSA Chief: Snowden Got Access To Top Secret Court Order During Training

Eric Lach | June 18, 2013, 4:46PM

Gen. Keith B. Alexander, director of the National Security Agency and head of the U.S. Cyber Command, testifies before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, June 18, 2013. Amid revelations that the electronic surveillance agency is sweeping up Americans' phone and Internet records in its quest to investigate terrorist threats, President Barack Obama defended top secret National Security Agency spying programs as legal during an interview yesterday, and called them transparent — even though they are authorized in secret.

One question many had been asking since Edward Snowden came forward as the source of recently leaked National Security Agency documents was just how someone in Snowden's position got access to an order issued by the highly secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

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NSA Leak

Five Revelations From The Edward Snowden Live Chat

Eric Lach | June 17, 2013, 4:44PM

A supporter holds a picture of Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee who leaked top-secret information about U.S. surveillance programs, outside the U.S. Consulate General in Hong Kong Thursday, June 13, 2013. The news of Snowden's whereabouts, revealed by an editor of a local newspaper that interviewed him Wednesday, is the first since he went to ground Monday after checking out of his hotel in this autonomous Chinese territory.

Last week, we learned who Edward Snowden was. This week, we live-chatted with him.

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NSA Leak

NSA Leaks Put Spotlight On Secret Court

Eric Lach | June 14, 2013, 4:04PM

The E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse in Washington, D.C.

The recent disclosure of top secret National Security Agency documents has sparked a debate over the trade offs involving secrecy and security when it comes to national security and intelligence. Part of the debate has to do with the oversight process -- the structures built in to the system to regulate the government's national security actions and capabilities.

Now, in turn, part of what makes the oversight process so hard to talk about is the fact that much of the process, too, is done in secret. Take, for example, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the court the government has to get through to get warrants in national security investigations.

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NSA Leak

ACLU Confident This NSA Lawsuit Won't Trip Where Last Did

Eric Lach | June 12, 2013, 1:23PM

Pedestrians pass a Verizon Wireless store on Canal Street, Thursday, June 6, 2013, in New York. The Obama administration on Thursday, June 6, 2013, defended the government's need to collect telephone records of American citizens, calling such information "a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats." Britain's Guardian newspaper reported that the NSA has been collecting the telephone records of millions of Verizon customers under a top secret court order.

The last time the American Civil Liberties Union challenged the power of the National Security Agency in court, the Supreme Court wound up dismissing the case, holding that the groups represented by the ACLU did not have "standing" to challenge the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program, because they could not prove their communications were monitored.

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NSA Leak

A Guide To The Career Of Edward Snowden

Eric Lach | June 10, 2013, 3:44PM

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things'

At the start of the video that served as his coming out to the world, the man behind the recent National Security Agency leaks looked, for a moment, directly into the camera.

"My name is Ed Snowden, I'm 29 years old, I work for Booz Allen Hamilton as an infrastructure analyst for [the] NSA, in Hawaii," Snowden told The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald, in an on-camera interview the newspaper put online on Sunday. "I have been a systems engineer, a systems administrator, [a] senior advisor for the Central Intelligence Agency's solutions consultant, and a telecommunications information systems officer."

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