Many of the images come courtesy of one man, the increasingly prolific Apple leaker, Sonny Dickson. Based in Australia, it would seem that Dickson has some very helpful contacts in Apple's Asian supply chain.

Dickson's site also houses more photos, videos, and "hands-on" content with several other iPhone parts and rear casings in a rainbow of colors.

In a statement, a spokesman for the deputy prime minister gave the first official confirmation that the cabinet secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, made the request to the Guardian.

A spokesman for Clegg made clear that Heywood was acting on the authority of both the prime minister and his deputy.

Rusbridger told officials that the Guardian would continue to report from the leaked documents because it had backup copies in the US and in Brazil. Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who received the documents from the US whistleblower Edward Snowden, lives in Rio de Janeiro.

The system has the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic in the hunt for foreign intelligence, including a wide array of communications by foreigners and Americans. In some cases, it retains the written content of emails sent between citizens within the U.S. and also filters domestic phone calls made with Internet technology, these people say.

Details of these surveillance programs were gathered from interviews with current and former intelligence and government officials and people from companies that help build or operate the systems, or provide data. Most have direct knowledge of the work.

I received a phone call from the centre of government telling me: "You've had your fun. Now we want the stuff back." There followed further meetings with shadowy Whitehall figures. The demand was the same: hand the Snowden material back or destroy it. I explained that we could not research and report on this subject if we complied with this request. The man from Whitehall looked mystified. "You've had your debate. There's no need to write any more."

And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian's long history occurred – with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian's basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents.

The problems began at about 11.50am Pacific Time on Monday in California, and Twitter quickly flooded with reports of people having trouble accessing both Amazon.com and the Amazon Web Services cloud, as well.

This outage follows a worldwide Google-fail last week that saw the Chocolate Factory temporarily disappear from the internet.

We'd think this was some kind of interactive Internet mystery if we didn't know better, but in fact WikiLeaks has released about 400 gigabytes' worth of mysterious data in a series of encrypted torrent files called "insurance." And no one can open it.

But if WikiLeaks releases the keys to the public—and all the governments of the world at once—then it's possible that the war on unauthorized access to government secrets could get a lot more dangerous.

The owner of an encrypted email service used by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden said he has been threatened with criminal charges for refusing to comply with a secret surveillance order to turn over information about his customers.

Levison stressed that he has complied with "upwards of two dozen court orders" for information in the past that were targeted at "specific users" and that "I never had a problem with that." But without disclosing details, he suggested that the order he received more recently was markedly different, requiring him to cooperate in broadly based surveillance that would scoop up information about all the users of his service.

NSA Director Keith B. Alexander denied that there were any problems with the NSA snooping programs and cited oversight by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to verify that point.

Barton Gellman’s reporting revealed that in October 2011 the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court ruled an NSA process collecting data from fiber optic cables was “deficient on statutory and constitutional grounds,” according to a top-secret summary of the opinion. It ordered the NSA to comply with standard privacy protections or stop the program. This appears to directly contradict Alexander’s claim that “no one at NSA had ever gone outside the boundaries” of their authority.

Radio Times is a well-known UK TV and radio listings magazine; another major site affected was the citizen science project Zooniverse. As an Open Rights Group (ORG) post explains, the specific Radio Times address that was blocked was radiotimes.com, while www.radiotimes.com continued to function

As ORG surmised, the problem arose from a UK court decision handed down last month that allowed the Football Association Premier League Limited to block FirstRow Sports, a site for live-streaming sports events.

Google is saying that you don't have an expectation of privacy when you're using Gmail. But what Google is also saying is that you knew you didn't have an expectation of privacy when you signed up, because when you signed up you agreed to contextual advertising, to indexed, searchable email, to spam filters, and to content filters like Priority Inbox.

Google reads your e-mail, knows what's in your calendar, looks at your photos, and knows who your friends are, and that's just via its in-house services. When you include the breadth of its search, Google knows everything about you that's public information, from your address to all your online profiles to your marital status and much, much more.