Snowdon is a dummy

USA and the UK branded an 'Enemy of the Internet' for the first time by Reporters Without Borders

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For the first time the UK has been included on Reporters Without Borders’ ‘Enemies of the Internet’, an annual list produced by the press watchdog to draw attention to countries disrupting freedom of information through censorship and surveillance.

The USA also made the list for the first time, alongside stalwarts including North Korea, China, and Iran.

Alan Rusbridger, the editor in chief of the Guardian, has been honoured at the European Press awards for leading the team which masterminded a series of remarkable disclosures from the files leaked by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The Guardian was given "The Special Award" by judges at the European Press Prize – Europe's equivalent of the Pulitzers – at a ceremony in London which brought together leading journalists, editors and commentators from across the continent.

The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden.

A senior manager for the program compares it to a time machine — one that can replay the voices from any call without requiring that a person be identified in advance for surveillance.

Some of the documents provided by Snowden suggest that high-volume eavesdropping may soon be extended to other countries, if it has not been already. The RETRO tool was built three years ago as a “unique one-off capability,” but last year’s secret intelligence budget named five more countries for which the MYSTIC program provides “comprehensive metadata access and content,” with a sixth expected to be in place by last October.

The web may be thought of as being worldwide, but from its inception the internet was created, controlled and overseen largely by a single country: the United States. Now, however, the US Government has said it intends to yield the reins to the global digital community.

The US Commerce Department has announced that it has asked the California-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) to plan a handover to an as-yet-undefined group consisting of both private and public “stakeholders”.

Fadi Chehadé, the president and chief executive of Icann, said: “We are inviting governments, the private sector, civil society, and other internet organisations from the whole world to join us in developing this transition process… All stakeholders deserve a voice in the management and governance of this global resource as equal partners.”

Observers say the decision was prompted by the whistle-blower Edward Snowden’s recent revelations, and that the subsequent backlash may have forced the administration to relinquish its historical control over the administration of the internet. As Rob Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington DC think-tank, put it, the US is “giving up its traditional ‘bodyguard’ role of Internet governance”.

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is a global set of conferences owned by the private non-profit Sapling Foundation, under the slogan "ideas worth spreading". TED was founded in 1984 as a one-off event. The annual conference began in 1990, in Monterey, California.

The senior lawyer for the National Security Agency stated unequivocally on Wednesday that US technology companies were fully aware of the surveillance agency’s widespread collection of data, contradicting month of angry denials from the firms.

Rajesh De, the NSA general counsel, said all communications content and associated metadata harvested by the NSA under a 2008 surveillance law occurred with the knowledge of the companies – both for the internet collection program known as Prism and for the so-called “upstream” collection of communications moving across the internet.