What Can We Learn from Edward Snowden
When NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents in the summer of 2013, he brought to light all of the programs that allow the NSA to spy on civilians, en...

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What Can We Learn from Edward Snowden - Video

Happy 31. birthday, lieber Edward Snowden
Videobotschaft des AK Demokratie und Recht der Klner Grnen vom 21.6.2014. Die Idee zu der Aktion kam von Katja Hartwig.

By: Marc Kersten

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Happy 31. birthday, lieber Edward Snowden - Video

Visa on the Verge: Snowden #39;s Russian 4 seasons, what #39;s next?
With his life being made into a Hollywood movie, ex-NSA analyst Edward Snowden executed the biggest intelligence leak in history and outwitted the spy agency to mark the one-year anniversary...

By: RT

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Visa on the Verge: Snowden's Russian 4 seasons, what's next? - Video

The background check company that vetted Edward Snowden and faces fraud accusations from the Justice Department has refused a congressional request for details about executive bonus payouts and the identities of some former officials.

The company does not anticipate making a further response, a lobbyist for USIS wrote in an April 10 email to Democratic staffers on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

SEE ALSO: Contractor that vetted Snowden gets load of work after paying lobbyists

The previously undisclosed email correspondence, obtained by The Washington Times last week, was in response to requests to USIS by Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, Maryland Democrat and ranking member of the oversight committee.

He wanted to know, among other things, how the company awarded bonuses, whether it conducted any internal investigations into fraud accusations and what, if any, actions officials took to claw back six- and seven-figure bonuses to former executives.

Those questions were raised in the wake of a Justice Department civil lawsuit accusing USIS of claiming it completed about 650,000 background investigations that actually remained unfinished, while receiving millions of dollars in performance awards from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

The company has addressed some of the issues raised by Mr. Cummings publicly, but not all of the information sought by the congressman has been disclosed. So far, the company has resisted providing answers.

Mr. Cummings inquiry was forwarded to USIS in March by Rep. Darrell E. Issa, California Republican and chairman of the House oversight panel, which held a hearing in February into last years Washington Navy Yard shootings. The gunman, Aaron Alexis, was vetted by USIS, which is a part of Virginia-based Altegrity Inc.

Months after requesting information from USIS CEO Sterling Phillips both at a hearing and in his follow-up letter Mr. Cummings is increasingly frustrated that his questions remain unanswered.

The CEO of USIS committed under oath that he would answer questions from the committee, but now his lobbyists say he refuses, Mr. Cummings told The Washington Times.

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Background check firm that vetted Snowden faces fraud ...

Snowden appears via Beam bot in the ACLUs New York offices with (from left) journalist Laura Poitras, Freedom of the Press Foundation director Trevor Timm and security technologist Micah Lee. Photo: Courtesy of Freedom of the Press Foundation

Since he first became a household name a year ago, Edward Snowden has been a modern Max Headroom, appearing only as a face on a screen broadcast from exile in Hong Kong or Russia. But in the age of the telepresence robot, being a face on a screen isnt as restrictive as it used to be.

For at least the past three months, Snowden and his supporters have been experimenting with a Beam Pro remote presence system, a Wi-Fi-connected screen and camera on wheels that Snowden can use to communicate with the staffers in the New York office of the American Civil Liberties Union, according to his ACLU lawyer Ben Wizner. From a computer in Moscow, Snowden can turn on the video bot and wheel around the ACLUs office on a whim. And Snowdens supporters hope the Beam system might be the first of several that could bring the distant whistleblower into the room with colleagues around the world, partially erasing the isolation enforced by the Espionage Act charges awaiting him if he leaves the relative safety of Russia.

Hes used it to roll out into the hallway and generously interact with large numbers of ACLU staff, says Wizner. I think it can be a profound response to exile.

Snowdens Beam bot has been in the ACLU offices since before his TED talk in March, when he used the same $16,000 wheeled robot to speak on stage. Wizner says the TED organizers wanted to test the robot in New York before it was used at the Vancouver conference. They brought a couple models to the office, and gave us a login, says Wizner. We found that it worked really well.

Snowden can drive his in-office telepresence system with his keyboards arrow keys at around two miles an hour. It has an eight hour battery life before it needs to dock into a $950 charging station, and even comes with a party mode that activates more ambient microphones and elevates the volume of its speaker.

Edward Snowden is interviewed by TED Curator Chris Anderson via Beam during the 2014 TED conference. Photo: Steven Rosenbaum/Getty

Since its first appearance at TED, Snowdens Beam came into the spotlight again Wednesday in a story in the German newspaper Tagesspiegel. But while Tagesspiegel described Snowden as using the Beam system on a regular basis, Wizner says Snowdenbot has been a more occasional visitor to the ACLU office. Once, the non-profits executive director Anthony Romero gave the Snowden-possessed machine a walking tour of the building. Another time, Wizner had to jump on a phone call during a meeting with his whistleblower client. When he got off the phone, he found that Snowden had rolled the bot into civil liberties lawyer Jameel Jaffers office and was discussing the 702 provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It was kind of cool, Wizner says.1

Trevor Timm, the director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation where Snowden sits on the board, says Snowden had been interested in trying the telepresence bot even before his TED talk. He was telling people for a while that it could be this game-changing technology, says Timm. I dont think anyone quite believed him until we saw it in actionAll he needs is arms to open doors, and he can go wherever he wants.

Timm met with Snowden-as-robot last April, along with journalist and Snowden-chronicling filmmaker Laura Poitras. It lights up and he shows up on the screen, Timm describes. When it started moving towards us, everyone kind of jumped back.

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Inside Edward Snowden’s Life as a Robot

A debate in the U.S. about whether the National Security Agency should end its bulk collection of U.S. telephone and business records has come down to an argument over the meaning of the word bulk.

A year after the first leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden were published, it appears that already scaled-back proposals to limit the NSAs bulk collection of U.S. telephone and business records may not even happen. And officials with President Barack Obamas administration, backing an NSA reform bill called the USA Freedom Act, have already begun to pick holes in its definitions.

An amended version of the USA Freedom Act that passed the House of Representatives in May would allow the NSA to continue to target wide groups of U.S. records, critics said, because of its expanded definition of the terms the NSA must use to define its searches.

President Barack Obama in January announced plans to end the bulk collection of U.S. phone and business records, and administration officials have said the amended version of the USA Freedom Act would accomplish that goal.

But whether Obamas plan or the bill ends bulk collection depends on the definition of bulk. Deputy Attorney General James Cole told the Senate Intelligence Committee Thursday that the prohibition on bulk collection means the indiscriminate collection of U.S. records. The USA Freedom Act would allow the NSA to collect large numbers of records, if a surveillance court judge approves the request, he said.

Somewhat contradictory, Cole said the bill would prohibit the collection of all phone records in a ZIP code. That would be the type of indiscriminate bulk collection that this bill is designed to end, he said.

The language in the bill tells a different story, critics said.

Senators, let us not use the phrase, bulk collection, as coded jargon for existing programs or nationwide surveillance dragnets, Harley Geiger, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said during the Thursday hearing. Rather, bulk collection, as any normal person would understand it, means the large-scale collection of information about individuals with no connection to a crime or investigation.

The version of the bill that passed the House would allow the NSA to target wide groups of U.S. records, critics said, because it allows an expended definition of a specific selection term that the NSA must use to define its searches. The amended version of the bill allows the NSA to target things such as a person, entity, accounts, address, or device, language that would give the NSA few limits on what groups it can target, critics said.

The amended USA Freedom Act does not end bulk collection, Geiger added. The definition of specific selection term is deliberately ambiguous and open-ended. There is nothing in the bill that would prohibit, for example, the use of [search terms] Verizon, Gmail.com or the state of Georgia as a specific selection term.

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Snowden leaks after one year: Wrangling over the meaning of 'bulk'