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"First, the journalists working with the documents. I've handled some of the Snowden documents myself, and even though I'm a paranoid cryptographer, I know how difficult it is to maintain perfect security. It's been open season on the computers of the journalists Snowden shared documents with since this story broke in July 2013. And while they have been taking extraordinary pains to secure those computers, it's almost certainly not enough to keep out the world's intelligence services."

"In his most extensive public comments to date Snowden sought to answer critics who have said his actions damaged US national security or that the threat from the secret government surveillance he revealed was overblown. Snowden was interviewed by the NBC News anchor Brian Williams, who travelled to Moscow for the meeting"

""I'd like to ask you," NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden asked Russian leader Vladimir Putin on a televised call-in show, "does Russia intercept, store or analyze in any way the communications of millions of individuals?" Putin, a former KGB agent and head of Russia's intelligence service, spoke about what they had in common: spycraft. "

"in the post-Snowden era, we can no longer address the "digital divide" just by providing access -- we also have to teach people how their online usage is spied on, how that will harm them, and what to do about it. "

"These new tracking measures may someday be repurposed to advance governments' mass surveillance programs, Snowden warned"

"Former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden says that tech workers need to think long and hard about how their labor is used by companies to amass power, surveil people, and fundamentally change society, and need to think about whether it is ethical to work at tech companies at all."

"The secure email service used by US whistleblower Edward Snowden has shut down rather than comply with orders from US security services - and is also legally barred from speaking out. The owner and operator of Lavabit, Ladar Levison, took the service down yesterday "for maintenance" before revealing today that the real reason was demands from US intelligence."

"But with the Snowden revelations and the widespread understanding of ubiquitous Internet surveillance (something that a minority was always aware of, of course), sociologists have observed a marked chilling effect on political and social discourse, as people who disagree with the majority fear that their searches and discussions will be observed, correlated, logged and use to ascribe guilt to them. "

"The new documents reveal that a GCHQ unit dubbed the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group, or JTRIG, launched an operation called Rolling Thunder against the hacker collective in 2011. That operation included using DDoS attacks as well as malware to slow down the hackers and later identify them, as first reported by as reported by NBC News on Wednesday."

"Now spool forward to the present. One of the things that baffles me is why more people are not alarmed by what Edward Snowden has been telling us about the scale and intrusiveness of internet surveillance. My hunch is that this is partly because - strangely - people can't relate the revelations to things they personally understand."

"More than 500 of the world's leading authors, including five Nobel prize winners, have condemned the scale of state surveillance revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden and warned that spy agencies are undermining democracy and must be curbed by a new international charter."

"The transparency report is in its third year, but it hasn't prevented attacks from advocates such as Edward Snowden, who called the company "hostile to privacy". "Dropbox is a targeted you know wannabe PRISM partner," he told the Guardian in July 2014. "They just put … Condoleezza Rice on their board … who is probably the most anti-privacy official you can imagine.""

"If you're doing nothing wrong, and have nothing to hide from your government, then mass surveillance holds no fears for you. This argument might be the oldest straw man in the privacy debate, but it's also a decent reflection of the state of the argument. In the UK's first major election since the Snowden revelations, privacy is a nonissue. This is a shame, because when it comes down to it, many of us who are doing nothing wrong have plenty we would prefer to hide."

"The agency has invested nearly $80 million to build a computer that could break "nearly every kind of encryption," according to a Washington Post report published online Thursday. Based on documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the Post reports the NSA is racing to build a "cryptologically useful quantum computer" research program called "Penetrating Hard Targets.""

"A newly released set of slides from the Snowden leaks reveals that the NSA is harvesting millions of facial images from the Web for use in facial recognition algorithms through a program called "Identity Intelligence." James Risen and Laura Poitras's NYT piece shows that the NSA is linking these facial images with other biometrics, identity data, and "behavioral" data including "travel, financial, behaviors, social network." "

"The NSA's AURORAGOLD program -- revealed in newly released Snowden docs -- used plundered internal emails to compromise nearly every mobile carrier in the world, and show that the agency had planned to introduce vulnerabilities into future improvements into mobile security. "

"India has started using a system that allows security agencies and income tax officials to directly intercept phone calls and emails without any court or legislative oversight, Reuters reported this summer."

The latest Snowden leak suggests US and UK cyberspies are taking advantage of Google's proprietary cookie technology in an effort to track suspects.

"There it is. If you run a business, and the FBI or NSA want to turn it into a mass surveillance tool, they believe they can do so, solely on their own initiative. They can force you to modify your system. They can do it all in secret and then force your business to keep that secret. Once they do that, you no longer control that part of your business. You can't shut it down. You can't terminate part of your service. In a very real sense, it is not your business anymore. It is an arm of the vast U.S. surveillance apparatus, and if your interest conflicts with theirs then they win. Your business has been commandeered."