"PRISM is not an undisclosed collection or data mining program," Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said in a fact sheet on the program.

The National Security Agency's classified PRISM program is an internal government computer system used to manage foreign intelligence collected from Internet and other electronic service providers, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said in a statement Saturday.

The disclosure Saturday marks the most extensive explanation the government has offered of what the program is, how it works and what it is authorized to collect.

Clapper said he declassified the details of the NSA's surveillance and intelligence collection programs "in hope that it will help dispel some of the myths and add necessary context to what has been published" about government surveillance of Americans' phone records and foreigners' Internet use.

The National Security Agency and the FBI are siphoning personal data from the main computer servers of nine major U.S. Internet firms, The Washington Post and the London-based Guardian reported Thursday night. Clapper said those reports lacked context about how the program is governed.

More and more, we're counting on having angels in office and making ourselves vulnerable to devils.

Let's assume that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, their staffers, and every member of Congress for the last dozen years has always acted with pure motives in the realm of national security. Say they've used the power they've claimed, the technology they've developed, and the precedents they've established exclusively to fight al-Qaeda terrorists intent on killing us, that they've succeeded in disrupting what would've been successful attacks, and that Americans are lucky to have had men and women so moral, prudent, and incorruptible in charge.

Sir Jonathan Evans, who stepped down as director-general of MI5 last month, has become latest heavyweight non-executive director at HSBC.
The 55-year-old, who joins in August, will be on the main board as well as a member of the new financial system vulnerabilities committee, set up identify areas where the bank may become exposed to financial crime or system abuse.

HSBC is acting to restore is reputation after being fined $1.9bn (£1.2bn) for exposing America's financial system to exploitation by drug cartels and terrorists due money laundering breaches. It is also facing investigations by regulators looking into alleged Libor rigging and accusation that it has helped customers avoid tax.

During his 33 years at M15 his focus was on international and domestic counter-terrorism, including cyber threats.

"His experience and expertise gained from a career at the highest level of public service combating threats to data security, critical infrastructure and from international terrorism and organised crime will be of considerable value to the Board as it addresses its governance of systemic threats," said Douglas Flint, the chairman of HSBC.

Abby Martin breaks down the latest surveillance scandal by the National Security Agency, in which the servers of firms such as Google, Facebook, and Apple are subject constant government surveillance.

What happens when you allow commercial interests free rein over a nation state's food and agricultural policies? Consumers and farmers end up paying the price. Take the current predicament of wheat contamination in the US .

Genetically engineered (GE) wheat is not approved to be grown for commercial use in the US or anywhere else in the world. Yet the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has announced that unapproved GE wheat has been found growing in an Oregon wheat field ⁽¹⁾. An Oregon farmer sprayed his wheat field, intending it to lay fallow for the next year. Despite multiple sprays of Monsanto's Round Up, the farmer found that the crops unexpectedly persisted, just as GE crops are engineered to do. This prompted him to send samples to a scientist at Oregon State University , who determined that the crops were infused with the RoundUp Ready gene. The USDA confirmed the results.

Data covertly collected by the US National Security Agency (NSA) from American telecom and Internet firms has been shared with its British counterpart, media reports revealed.

Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has been given information gathered in the US-run PRISM system, which grants the American spy agency a direct line to data stored on the servers of Google, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo and five other tech giants.

Documents obtained by the Guardian revealed that the GCHQ has had access to PRISM since at least June 2010, having generated 197 intelligence reports from it last year. Access to the information has allowed the British electronic eavesdropping and security agency to bypass the formal legal process required to obtain such information from a non-UK-based company.

Throughout PRISM's seven-year existence, operatives at the NSA and FBI have collected email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP (Skype) chats, file transfers and social networking details, with the ostensible purpose of thwarting terror attacks.

The National Security Agency may have been conducting massive surveillance of the Internet through its PRISM program, including surveillance of Facebook--as The Guardian and The Washington Post reported yesterday--but that did not prevent the administration from blaming the Benghazi terrorist attack, which a terrorist group was openly taking credit for on Facebook, on a spontaneous reaction to an anti-Muslim video posted on YouTube.

While the Benghazi attack was still unfolding on the evening of Sept. 11, 2012, Ansar al-Sharia, a Benghazi-based terrorist group with links to al Qaeda, made a posting on Facebook taking responsibility for the attack. Despite Ansar al-Sharia's Facebook posting, the administration publicly explained the attack as the outgrowth of a spontaneous demonstration against an anti-Muslim video posted on YouTube.

At about 3:42 p.m. Washington, D.C., time on Sept. 11, 2012, a group of terrorists swarmed through the front gate of the State Department's Special Mission Compound in Benghazi.

"Air Force One is next," read the message received by the U.S. Secret Service at 9 a.m. Sept. 11, after two hijacked planes struck the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York.

Three minutes later, Secret Service agents grabbed Vice President Dick Cheney from his seat opposite a television set in the White House and hustled him down to the president's emergency operations center, a bunker built to withstand a nuclear blast.

The terrorists' message threatening Air Force One was transmitted in that day's top-secret White House code words. As the clock ticked away, the Secret Service reached a frightening conclusion: The terrorists had obtained the White House code and a whole set of top-secret signals.

This made it possible for a hostile force to pinpoint the exact position of Air Force One, its destination and its classified procedures. In fact, the hijackers were picking up and deciphering the presidential plane's incoming and outgoing transmissions.

Moving to tamp down a public uproar spurred by the disclosure of two secret surveillance programs, the nation's top intelligence official is declassifying key details about one of the programs while insisting the efforts to collect Americans' phone records and the U.S. internet use of foreign nationals overseas were legal, limited in scope and necessary to detect terrorist threats.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, in an unusual late-night statement Thursday, denounced the leaks of highly classified documents that revealed the programs and warned that America's security will suffer. He called the disclosure of a program that targets foreigners' Internet use "reprehensible," and said the leak of another program that lets the government collect Americans' phone records would change enemies' behavior and make it harder to understand their intentions.

"The unauthorized disclosure of a top secret U.S. court document threatens potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to the many threats facing our nation," Clapper said of the phone-tracking program.

It was revealed late Wednesday that the National Security Agency has been collecting the phone records of hundreds of millions of U.S. phone customers. The leaked document first reported by the British newspaper the Guardian gave the NSA authority to collect from all of Verizon's land and mobile customers, but intelligence experts said the program swept up the records of other phone companies too. The possibility of a third secret program letting the NSA tap into credit card transaction records emerged late Thursday in a report in The Wall Street Journal. The White House did not immediately respond to an inquiry about that program.

Connecticut became the first state in the nation to pass a GMO labeling law on Monday, but food advocates and those who are concerned about what they eat shouldn't bust out the (organic) bubbly just yet.

Though the mere fact that the Connecticut General Assembly passed a GMO labeling bill is a step in the right direction, the full story is a disturbing reminder of how powerful the biotech lobby really is.

Food advocates have long called on the federal government and state legislatures to enact laws to require food products that contain genetically engineered ingredients to be labeled as such. And for some time this year it appeared as though Connecticut was on track to do just that, as many lawmakers had publicly endorsed a strongly worded GMO labeling bill.