As the U.S. government continues to pursue former NSA contractor Edward Snowden for leaking some of the country's most sensitive intelligence secrets, the debate over federal surveillance seems to have abated somewhat — despite Snowden's stated wish for his revelations to spark transformative and wide-ranging debate, it doesn't seem as if anyone's taking to the streets to protest the NSA's reported monitoring of Americans' emails and phone-call metadata.

Despite some polling data that suggests people are concerned about their privacy, software for securing it is just not an exciting topic for most folks.

Her creation, called "Vortex," is a browser extension that's part game, part ad-targeting disrupter that helps people turn their user profiles and the browsing information into alternate fake identities that have nothing to do with reality.

Vortex features a profile switcher that people can use and share to take on a new identity while browsing the web. "It's a way of masking your identity across networks," she said.

Vortex has security holes that could be exploited by nefarious actors, which is one reason Ms. Law refuses to release the full platform.

France's foreign intelligence service intercepts computer and telephone data on a vast scale, like the controversial US Prism programme, according to the French daily Le Monde.

The DGSE allegedly analyses the "metadata" - not the contents of e-mails and other communications, but the data revealing who is speaking to whom, when and where.

The French government has sharply criticised the US spying, which allegedly included eavesdropping on official EU communications.

On Wednesday, WikiLeaks announced that Valitor, its payment processor in Iceland, has resumed accepting credit card-based donations for the famed leaking site.

Less than a week after the Icelandic district court’s ruling in July 2012, WikiLeaks opened up a donations avenue through a French bank. And a new group, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, set up an online means to donate to Assange’s initiative by December 2012.

Green party politician Malte Spitz sued to have German telecoms giant Deutsche Telekom hand over six months of his phone data that he then made available to ZEIT ONLINE. We combined this geolocation data with information relating to his life as a politician, such as Twitter feeds, blog entries and websites, all of which is all freely available on the internet.

The recent discovery that Apple's iOS hotspot passwords are readily crackable in under 50 seconds is part of a wider problem involving other smartphone platforms, claim researchers.

"Anyone who knows your WPA key and is around when you connect to your network can decrypt your traffic in real time," Ducklin warns. "And anyone who is around when you connect and can sniff your traffic can attempt to crack the password and decrypt your traffic later. Choose your own passphrase, and make it a good one, when using iOS's Personal Hotspot," he concludes.

Slides published by The Washington Post appear to confirm that the NSA and FBI have the ability to perform real-time surveillance of e-mail and stored content.

The slides also seem to contradict denials from tech companies such as Google, Apple, Yahoo, and Microsoft about their level of participation in the program.

Microsoft was the first company to join the program in September 2007, according to one slide, followed by Yahoo about six months later and Google in early 2009, according to one of the slides.

For the first time, encryption is thwarting government surveillance efforts through court-approved wiretaps, U.S. officials said today.

Consider that, when federal law enforcement officials were clamoring for legislation authorizing a backdoor into most all electronic communication methods during the President Bill Clinton administration, FBI Director Louis Freeh told Congress in 1997, “all of law enforcement is also in total agreement on one aspect of encryption. The widespread use of uncrackable encryption will devastate our ability to fight crime and prevent terrorism.”

Gordon Van Vleet, an Arizona-based spokesman for the Army Network Enterprise Technology Command, or NETCOM, said in an email the Army is filtering "some access to press coverage and online content about the NSA leaks."

The Guardian's website has classified documents about the NSA's program of monitoring phone records of Verizon customers, a project called Prism which gave the agency "direct access" to data held by Google, Facebook, Apple and others, and more.

The documents indicate that under the program, launched in 2001, a federal judge sitting on the secret surveillance panel called the Fisa court would approve a bulk collection order for internet metadata "every 90 days".

But while that specific program has ended, additional secret NSA documents seen by the Guardian show that some collection of Americans' online records continues today.