Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden is willing to return to the U.S. if he is guaranteed a fair trial, his lawyer says.

"Edward Snowden is ready to return to the US, but on the condition that he be given guarantees to receive a fair and impartial trial," lawyer Anatoly Kucherena said, according to the Russian news agency TASS.

Kucherena said he received a letter from the U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder promising Snowden would not face capital punishment should he return.

"So what we are being guaranteed is not the fa

French intelligence did not prevent the Paris attacks despite benefitting from "most intrusive" surveillance laws because suspects are "buried under data", US whistleblower Edward Snowden said on Wednesday.

"France passed one of the most intrusive, expansive surveillance laws in all of Europe last year and it didn't stop the attack," the former US intelligence contractor told Dutch state broadcaster NOS in an interview.

N.S.A. leaker Edward Snowden on Saturday defended his disclosure of reams of classified information and said his actions were worth fleeing his seemingly idyllic life in Hawaii and ending up in hiding in Russia, where he was joined by his girlfriend in July.
“It was about getting the information back to people so they could decide if they cared about it, and on that account … I could not have been more wrong in thinking that people wouldn’t care,” he told a New Yorker Festival audience Saturday afternoon via webcast from an undisclosed location in Moscow.

A former top official at the National Security Agency says the Islamic State terrorist group has “clearly” capitalized on the voluminous leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and is exploiting the top-secret disclosures to evade U.S. intelligence.

Readers are seeing a new side of Edward Snowden, this time on the cover of Wired magazine’s September issue, where the National Security Agency leaker cradles an American flag.
In the story, Snowden describes to reporter James Bamford an NSA program called MonsterMind, designed to prevent foreign cyberattacks and automatically fire back at the source of those attacks, without any human action. He argues the program could also be the biggest invasion of privacy known.

Development of a U.S. counterattack for cyberterrorism that could do more harm than good was one of the final events that drove Edward Snowden to leak government secrets, the former National Security Agency contractor tells Wired magazine.

Snowden, photographed for the story clutching an American flag, said the MonsterMind program was designed to detect a foreign cyberattack and keep it from entering the country. But it also would automatically fire back. The problem, he

Former Rep. Ron Paul has taken his push for clemency for Edward Snowden to a new level, announcing he’s collected more than 37,000 signatures in the past five months — about a third of what he says he needs to get a White House response.

Mr. Paul wrote on his blog of Mr. Snowden’s “sacrifices” to reveal “the disturbing scope of the National Security Agency[‘s] … mass surveillance and data collection efforts,” and said the U.S. government ought to award him clemency and let him return home.

Edward Snowden's temporary asylum status in Russia expired at midnight Thursday, but the former U.S. National Security Agency systems administrator appears set to stay on until authorities decide on his application for an extension.

Snowden was stranded in a Moscow airport last year en route from Hong Kong to Cuba, shortly after he revealed the NSA's sprawling program of tapping phones. He received temporary asylum in Russia, attracting Washington's ire.

Eighteenth-century rights clash with 21st-century computer technologies Thursday, when a court hears an appeal from Microsoft against a warrant it says tramples the Fourth Amendment.
The case — in which Microsoft is resisting a U.S. warrant to turn over computer files stored in Ireland wanted by feds for a drug probe here at home — is being dubbed the “Fort Sumter of privacy,” by one former prosecutor. After being considered by a New York federal judge, legal experts say the case could ultimately make its way to a federal appeals court or even to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Former National Security Agency director Michael Hayden, speaking on CBS's "Face the Nation," insisted that Edward Snowden has harmed national security by disclosing previously classified NSA data-collection programs to The Washington Post and other news media outlets.
"Unquestionable, irreparable, irreversible harm," Hayden said Sunday morning, responding to an interview that Snowden did last week — the former NSA contractor's first in the yea