The internal computer network of Petrobras, the Brazilian oil giant partly owned by the state, has been under surveillance by the NSA, the National Security Agency of the United States.

These new disclosures contradict statements by the NSA denying espionage for economic purposes.

Other targets include French diplomats – with access to the private network of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France – and the SWIFT network, the cooperative that unites over ten thousand banks in 212 countries and provides communications that enable international financial transactions.

The statement also stresses that the collected intelligence is not used “to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of – or give intelligence we collect to – US companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line.”

"We want to be really, really clear that whenever you give us information, we're going to take it."

You might translate Egan's words as: "We're going to use everything you give us to make money. How could you possibly think otherwise, silly?"

Last Thursday, Google was in a San Jose court explaining very politely that of course it has every right to not only scan every e-mail you send via Gmail -- but also every e-mail that's sent to your Gmail account.

The argument used by Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, and the NSA is the same: Trust us. We're just doing our job. We know right from wrong.

The agency has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world, the documents show.

Intelligence officials asked The Times and ProPublica not to publish this article, saying that it might prompt foreign targets to switch to new forms of encryption or communications that would be harder to collect or read.

Hacktivists loyal to Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad have taken over The New York Times’ web address to broadcast a circa-1998-style defacement message: “Hacked by Syrian Electronic Army.

The hacker gang boasted on its Twitter feed today that it also wrested control of one of Twitter’s domains, and Whois records show that the administrative and technical contacts were set to “SEA SEA.” Twitter says image serving was temporarily disrupted as a result.

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.

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.

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.

Deutsche Telekom AG and United Internet AG announced on Friday that they were joining forces in a project dubbed “E-Mail Made in Germany,” which would see all emails sent from the T-Online, GMX or Web.de services automatically encrypted.

Under the new system, the contents, attachments and metadata of the emails are to be encrypted while in transit between the sender and receiver. The data is to be available in an unencrypted state on the companies' servers but any access to third parties, such as prosecutors, is to be granted only in compliance with German law.

The New York Times' Eric Lichtblau and Michael S. Schmidt report that the NSA has turned away the majority of requests for information sharing from federal law enforcement agencies, on the grounds that the requests have too little to do with national security and could be misused in ways that violate citizens' privacy.

Facebook said Wednesday that https is now the default standard for everyone browsing its social network, meaning that almost all traffic to its Web site and a majority of traffic to its mobile site will be established through a secure connection.

The hope is to insulate people from man-in-the-middle and eavesdropping attacks, and prevent members' accounts from being comprised.