Maassen says Russia is tipping money into misinformation campaigns in "aggressive and elevated" spying against "German Government officials, members of parliament, and employees of democratic parties".

Russia has hit back with Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for president Vladimir Putin, saying last month that the nation is also bracing for attacks during its next election, adding that Germany like all other European countries hacks other nation's infrastructure.

Most critically, if a Cabinet minister decides she wants a backdoor to be introduced into some software, is there anything that can stop him or her? The answer to that is almost certainly no, except she can be slowed down and would likely make some concessions to move ahead.

At the end of the day, will the UK security services be able to read your email, your messages, your posts and private tweets, and your communications if they believe you pose a threat to national security? Yes, they will.

Germany's government has been told that it should make suitable arrangements for that to happen. It has been refusing to invite Snowden to give evidence personally since it would need to guarantee that he would not be handed over to the US—a promise the German authorities say would risk damaging the political relations between the two countries.

The committee of inquiry is examining to what extent German citizens and politicians were spied on by the NSA and its so-called Five Eyes partners—notably GCHQ—and whether German politicians and intelligence agencies knew about this activity.

CETA is a smaller-scale agreement between the EU and Canada, but it's more important than it looks. It allows US companies with subsidiaries in Canada to use the agreement's corporate sovereignty provisions to sue the EU -- and there are 42,000 such companies according to one analysis.

As in the EU, then, the Canadian public is expected to sit back and meekly allow their government to sign up to a deal with open-ended risks, thanks to corporate sovereignty, but without any proper scrutiny of the costs and alleged benefits.

“But our analysis is that [FBI Director James B.] Comey’s letter raising doubts that were groundless, baseless, proven to be, stopped our momentum,” she said.

“Just as we were back up on the upward trajectory, the second letter from Comey essentially doing what we knew it would — saying there was no there there — was a real motivator for Trump’s voters,” Clinton said.

With Trump's win, it's still not clear what a Trump administration would do on the issues of cybersecurity and encryption. As Ars reported last month, Trump and his campaign team have been vague on many such details.

The Republican candidate said in 1990 that he favored legalization of all drugs. Speaking of the war on drugs at the time, he said, "You have to legalize drugs to win that war."

James Comey, the FBI director, has been facing intense criticism for days now following his Friday revelations that the bureau has started investigating newly discovered e-mails said to have passed through Hillary Clinton's private server.

Comey told fellow staffers Friday that he was obligated to tell Congress about the renewed inquiry because he had publicly stated months ago that the inquiry was over.

The social-media company unveiled a feature this week designed to help users create a voting plan, showing not just presidential candidates but also information on statewide elections.

Facebook's elections feature is another example of how social-media companies have been working to capture as much of the conversation around the 2016 presidential race as possible.

Donald Trump called the stunning announcement "bigger than Watergate", and Mrs Clinton appeared blindsided by the news, declining to mention it during a rally in Iowa.

"Hillary Clinton's corruption is on a scale we have never seen before. We must not let her take her criminal scheme into the Oval Office," the Republican nominee said.

Look, it's getting ridiculous that Hillary Clinton defenders keep insisting that the John Podesta emails released by Wikileaks are full of fakes and doctored content. With most other leaks, including the one of Colin Powell's emails, the victims (and, yes, they are victims) eventually admit that the leaked content is legit. Not so with the Podesta emails.

The trick is DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) signatures. DKIM was a system set up a while back to try to fight spam by cryptographically proving that the account that says it sent the mail actually sent the email in question. Not all email systems use DKIM, but hillaryclinton.com does use it.