“It’s still a capital crime, and I would give him the death sentence, and I would prefer to see him hanged by the neck until he’s dead, rather than merely electrocuted,” James Woolsey told CNN’s Brooke Baldwin on Thursday.

Current CIA Director John Brennan has recently echoed his predecessor’s sentiments, arguing that Snowden's disclosures make it harder for intelligence officials to track terror plots.

"The TPP means that America will write the rules of the road in the 21st century," Obama said. "If we don't pass this agreement—if America doesn't write those rules—then countries like China will.

Meanwhile, the deal also exports US copyright law regarding how long a copyright lasts. The plan, which now needs approval from all the pact's member nations, makes copyrights last for the life of the creator plus 70 years after death.

Motion Picture Association of America Chairman Chris Dodd lauds the partnership, saying: "Enacting a high-standard TPP with strong copyright protections is an economic priority for the American motion picture and television industry, which registered nearly $16 billion in exports in 2013 and supports nearly two million jobs throughout all fifty states."

While FBI officials are America’s servants, Baker argued that encryption is making it harder for the bureau to protect the nation from terrorism and other criminal activity.

“Your Gmail operates the way it does because Google can monetize the communications,” he said. “You could pay for a service that doesn’t operate that way, but most people don’t tend to… Are we really going dark or are we living in a golden age of surveillance?”

In January, the bloc promised to safeguard green laws, defend international standards and protect the EU’s right to set high levels of environmental protection, in a haggle with the US over terms for a free trade deal.

Lone Pine launched an unresolved $250m suit against the state of Quebec after it introduced a fracking moratorium, using ISDS provisions in the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta).

“This new leak illustrates that the European commission is not serious about protecting essential safeguards for citizens and the environment in the context of the TTIP talks,” she told the Guardian. “Powerful corporate polluters are likely to get VIP treatment under it, while the only chapter that could bring strong language to protect essential regulations to build a sustainable future is weak and unenforceable.”

German authorities are investigating whether the head of the German Federal Chancellery unit had his laptop infected with Regin, a highly sophisticated suite of malware programs that has been linked to the NSA and its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters.

Kaspersky's investigation in 2014 into Regin is what led the researchers to first come upon The Equation Group, the name Kaspersky has given to a hacker group with NSA ties that operated clandestinely for 14 years before being discovered. The Equation Group is arguably the most sophisticated team of hackers ever to come to light.

The discovery comes after separate documents provided by Snowden in 2013 showed NSA agents eavesdropping on cell phone conversations of Merkel. Prosecutors in Germany investigated the claim but dropped the probe in June, citing insufficient evidence.

Today's release by Wikileaks of what is believed to be the current and essentially final version of the intellectual property (IP) chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) confirms our worst fears about the agreement, and dashes the few hopes that we held out that its most onerous provisions wouldn't survive to the end of the negotiations.

If you dig deeper, you'll notice that all of the provisions that recognize the rights of the public are non-binding, whereas almost everything that benefits rightsholders is binding.

Perhaps the biggest overall defeat for users is the extension of the copyright term to life plus 70 years (QQ.G.6), despite a broad consensus that this makes no economic sense, and simply amounts to a transfer of wealth from users to large, rights-holding corporations.

If you look for provisions in the TPP that actually afford new benefits to users, rather than to large, rights-holding corporations, you will look in vain. The TPP is the archetype of an agreement that exists only for the benefit of the entitled, politically powerfully lobbyists who have pushed it through to completion over the last eight years.

The address linked to former Police Minister Damian Green was apparently used from a computer in Parliament in 2007 to register with the cheaters’ site.

“I don’t know who has used this account. I’ve had so many email accounts over the years. I may have had an aol address many years ago.

An address of Scottish National Party MP Michelle Thomson was found in the database earlier this week.

She denied any knowledge and said her details had been “harvested by hackers”.

Trump singled out Zuckerberg with the release of his immigration reform policy that, among other things, details a plan to build a wall between the United States and Mexico.

The Trump believes the US should instead adopt a “Requirement to hire American workers first” because “Too many visas, like the H-1B, have no such requirement.”

Moneybags Google has topped the list of tech-giant political lobbyists again, spending $4.62m in the past three months alone in Washington DC and elbowing its way into an enormous range of issues.

The multimillion-dollar total is, essentially, the wages and expenses bill of Google's political pressure unit.

Several ministers arrived for their crunch meeting in Brussels expressing scepticism that Athens would implement the austerity measures it has proposed.

One unnamed European official, quoted by the Associated Press, said there was a general feeling in the room that the Greek proposals are "too little, too late" and as such "more specific and binding commitments" are needed from the government in Athens.