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Under the previously secret agreement, the telco was required to route all communications involving a US point of contact through a secure storage facility on US soil that was staffed exclusively by US citizens carrying a top-level security clearance.

The data Telstra stored for the US government includes the actual content of emails, online messages and phone calls.

The US Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation also demanded that Telstra “provide technical or other assistance to facilitate … electronic surveillance”.

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The files provided by Edward Snowden illustrate the scale of co-operation between Silicon Valley and the intelligence agencies over the last three years. They also shed new light on the workings of the top-secret Prism program, which was disclosed by the Guardian and the Washington Post last month.

The documents show that:

* Microsoft helped the NSA to circumvent its encryption to address concerns that the agency would be unable to intercept web chats on the new Outlook.com portal;

* The agency already had pre-encryption stage access to email on Outlook.com, including Hotmail;

* The company worked with the FBI this year to allow the NSA easier access via Prism to its cloud storage service SkyDrive, which now has more than 250 million users worldwide;

* Microsoft also worked with the FBI’s Data Intercept Unit to “understand” potential issues with a feature in Outlook.com that allows users to create email aliases;

* In July last year, nine months after Microsoft bought Skype, the NSA boasted that a new capability had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism;

In one of the unpublished studies, researchers made a human artificial chromosome in the laboratory from chemical building blocks rather than chipping away at an existing human chromosome, indicating the increasingly powerful technology behind the new field of synthetic biology.

The development comes as the Government announces today that it will invest tens of millions of pounds in synthetic biology research in Britain, including an international project to construct all the 16 individual chromosomes of the yeast fungus in order to produce the first synthetic organism with a complex genome.

The batwing-shaped X-47B executed one of the hardest maneuvers in aviation, catching the arrested-landing gear on the deck of the USS George HW Bush off the mid-Atlantic coast, the navy announced Wednesday. Never before has a robot performed a feat executable only by the navy’s top pilots.

“Your grandchildren and great-grandchildren and mine will be reading about this historic event in their history books,” said Rear Admiral Mat Winter, the head of the navy’s drone programs.

The drone, followed by manned chase aircraft, flew from a Maryland airstrip on a pre-programmed flight path closely overseen by navy officials on land and on the deck of the Bush. It carried the call-sign Salty Dog 502. Once cleared by the landing signal officer, who had the distinction of being the first person to approve a robot for landing at sea, Salty Dog 502 put its hook down, caught the wire, and wrote a new chapter in naval history.

But that’s the problem, you see: There are no more pilots flying these planes. The real pilots have nearly all retired, leaving a bunch of “computer geeks” who have almost no flying skills and only know how to operate the computerized, automated flight equipment which is subject to catastrophic failure.

That’s what “Pilot X” told me in a phone interview. His identity is being secret for his own protection, but he recently retired from over two decades of flying Boeing’s largest aircraft for major U.S. airlines. He has received more actual flight time than 99% of today’s active commercial pilots, and he’s an expert in Boeing flight automation equipment. His testimony, below, reveals insider details that only a real commercial pilot would know.

“The bigger the plane, the worse the pilot,” he told me. “The airlines are trying to dumb down most of the entire fleet, and the pilots are losing all their flying skills. They don’t want pilots; they want computer geeks instead of someone who can actually fly. The stick-and-rudder skills go to hell in a hand basket when you don’t actually fly the plane.”

The SFO flight 214 accident was likely caused by the pilot relying on the auto-throttle, Pilot X explained to me. “There’s too much reliance on the auto-throttle. If you’re a real pilot, you can do much better than the auto-throttle by running the power yourself to stay in line with whatever approach you’re making.”

The other pilot on the flight deck was also partially responsible for failing to do his job, I was told:

“The non-flying pilot was not using CRM (crew resources management) where you call out the controls and altitude all the way down. They also had the glide slope switched off, and those two runways are too close together to be doing real close approaches.”

On Monday, Toronto police say, that multi-jurisdictional investigation culminated in the arrest of Benjamin Levin, a celebrated U of T education professor and highly regarded civil servant. The child pornography charges stunned colleagues in academic and political circles.

The father of three, who was named to Premier Kathleen Wynne’s transition team in January, will “vigorously defend” against the charges, lawyer Gerald Chan told reporters outside a North York courthouse Monday afternoon, following Levin’s arrest.

Investigators in New Zealand made contact with a suspect on an open online forum in January, said Jon Peacock, a senior inspector with a New Zealand internal affairs unit that specializes in online child-abuse investigations.

After several months of sporadic contact, the suspect sent “child abuse materials” to the investigator, Peacock said.

“As soon as that happened, we sent it to our colleagues at Toronto sex crimes,” he said.

Toronto police charged Levin, 61, with two counts of distributing child pornography and one count each of making child pornography, counselling to commit an indictable offence and agreeing to or arranging for a sexual offence against a child under 16.

Toronto police sources say the continued probe “overlaps” with investigations in New Zealand and England.

News of the arrest shocked associates in the academic and political communities between which Levin has split his professional life. He has been an educator, travelling the globe speaking on policy and research, and a public servant, appointed deputy minister for education in Manitoba and in Ontario, under former premier Dalton McGuinty.

Levin was named to Wynne’s transition team after she became leader of the Ontario Liberal Party in January.

The techniques are a key pillar of the Insider Threat Program, an unprecedented government-wide crackdown under which millions of federal bureaucrats and contractors must watch out for “high-risk persons or behaviors” among co-workers. Those who fail to report them could face penalties, including criminal charges.

Obama mandated the program in an October 2011 executive order after Army Pfc. Bradley Manning downloaded hundreds of thousands of documents from a classified computer network and gave them to WikiLeaks, the anti-government secrecy group. The order covers virtually every federal department and agency, including the Peace Corps, the Department of Education and others not directly involved in national security.

Under the program, which is being implemented with little public attention, security investigations can be launched when government employees showing “indicators of insider threat behavior” are reported by co-workers, according to previously undisclosed administration documents obtained by McClatchy. Investigations also can be triggered when “suspicious user behavior” is detected by computer network monitoring and reported to “insider threat personnel.”

The secret move, described briefly in a draft report by the Pentagon’s inspector general, set off no alarms within the Obama administration even though it appears to have sidestepped federal rules and perhaps also the Freedom of Information Act.

An acknowledgement by Adm. William McRaven of his actions was quietly removed from the final version of an inspector general’s report published weeks ago. A spokesman for the admiral declined to comment. The CIA, noting that the bin Laden mission was overseen by then-CIA Director Leon Panetta before he became defense secretary, said that the SEALs were effectively assigned to work temporarily for the CIA, which has presidential authority to conduct covert operations.

“Documents related to the raid were handled in a manner consistent with the fact that the operation was conducted under the direction of the CIA director,” agency spokesman Preston Golson said in an emailed statement. “Records of a CIA operation such as the (bin Laden) raid, which were created during the conduct of the operation by persons acting under the authority of the CIA Director, are CIA records.”