TechStew

Only a few hours before President Barack Obama is expected to announce changes regarding the NSA surveillance program, a new documents by Snowden were published that show once again the enormous magnitude of the espionage activities of the U.S. National Security Agency.  The documents revealed that the NSA collects hundreds of millions of text messages every day. Research on this issue was conducted by the British newspaper The Guardian, along with Channel 4 , and it was revealed that the NSA works closely with the British spy agency, GCHQ. Edward Snowden served these key documents to the media as usual. The documents reveal that the NSA collects nearly 200 million text messages every day, from around the world.  Furthermore, the data - collected from the messages - in some cases is used for further extraction of data such as location, contacts list, and even financial details. The Guardian mentions one special program, titled "Dishfire" which task is to collect ...

Ronald Pofalla, Chancellor Angela Merkel's chief of staff, discussed the ongoing NSA surveillance first before a German parliamentary committee and then in front of the media. His biggest concern was not just the information leaked by Edward Snowden which exposed the extent of the United States' global data surveillance operations, but the cooperation of German intelligence services as well. For a long time, Merkel tried to ride out the scandal; whenever she addressed the issue, she either spoke in vague terms or she simply said that she could not seriously be expected to be involved in everything.