For over a decade, the United States has promoted a free and open Internet as a central tenet of its foreign policy. To date, this has most visibly involved shaming governments that limit access to online content and developing tools that help individuals circumvent censorship and surveillance.

“The best possible birthday gift for Brazilian and global web users” is how Tim Berners-Lee, the British inventor of the world wide web, which turned 25 this month, described Brazil’s “internet bill of rights” in an open letter on March 24th. The next day legislators in the lower house of Congress duly approved it.

More than just politicians and diplomats using Twitter and Facebook, digital diplomacy allows countries to project their power beyond their borders. However the fledgling field is already experiencing a crisis of credibility in the wake of the NSA scandal, writes Antony Funnell.

Eli Lake at the Daily Beast has a new article arguing that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has tried to balance increased sharing of information within the intelligence community with increased punishment of those who leak information outside it.

Earlier this January, President Obama gave his first-ever one-on-one interview on German television. The background of this rare interview was news reports originating last year that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) had monitored communications of European citizens – and thereby had seemingly even listened in on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s private phone calls. In the wake of these reports, many Germans reacted with much anger towards the spy revelations.

House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Tex.) said Sunday that he thinks Edward Snowden was "cultivated by a foreign power" to leak sensitive information about the U.S. intelligence community's surveillance efforts. "I don't think Mr. Snowden woke up one day and had the wherewithal to do this all by himself," McCaul said on ABC's "This Week." "I think he was helped by others."

Europeans were largely underwhelmed by Barack Obama's speech on limited reform of US espionage practices, saying the measures did not go far enough to address concerns over American snooping on its European allies.