AUSTIN, Texas – Edward Snowden, the famed NSA whistle-blower gave his first public appearance since leaking secret information about the NSA’s massive web of surveillance. No, he wasn’t there in person, but was beamed into a Google Hangout with the Austin audience, pinging the video chat through seven different proxies in order to maintain the anonymity of his whereabouts in Russia. A U.S. Congressman even requested SxSW rescind their invitation to Snowden, to no avail. Over the course of an hour, he discussed Web and mobile security, hackers, data encryption and why for the sake of the 4th amendment he would make the same choices all over again.
Joining him in the conversation were Ben Wizner and Christopher Soghoian both prominent figues in the Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. The first question they put to Snowden was one that has been on many minds: why choose SxSW as his first appearance? Why techies and not policy makers? His answer was simple — many of the people here at SxSW are developers — the people capable of creating the technology necessary to fight against and prevent data collection and spying on such a massive level. “You guys are the firefighters in this battle,” Snowden told the audience.
Soghoian explained that the majority of apps and services we use every day on our mobile devices and in Web browsers are far less secure than you think, with most users trading ease of use and ubiquity of the app over more secure versions of software that are usually overly-complicated. Snowden believes its developers’ jobs to achieve safety and encryption that’s invisible at the user level, but the affects would have a large impact.
Ideally, if all apps worked harder at encrypting data, it would make surveillance and data collection on a massive scale too cost-prohibitive for the NSA, which they believe would ensure the privacy of individual users everywhere. Already major Internet companies such as Google and Yahoo have started using SSL security for their mail programs since Snowden’s leak of the NSA monitoring these popular web-based mail clients.
These increased security for users is seen as just the beginning to Snowden. He believes that it is the job of the over-the-top companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft and content providers like Netflix to encrypt and secure user data so that it never even reaches the phone carrier-level to try to obtain data. He insists that a new standard across all of these companies must happen so that there’s no “backdoor” hackers or the NSA could exploit.
Wizner brought up the fact that the FBI Director cites cyber-attacks as the No. 1 security in this country, above terrorists attacks, to which Snowden replied that the problem with the U.S. government’s security measures is their intense focus on offensive actions and not enough on defensive strategies that would protect the American people from phishing and other all-too-common hacks.
As if the conversation wasn’t sobering enough, Soghoian reminded the audience that at the end of the day the companies that create the Web browsers we use are advertising companies. The creators of these applications need to stand up to those who want to mine data, such as the NSA, and tell them “we don’t have that data,” or “the data’s not in a form that would be useful to you.” People should rethink their relationships with these companies and if they want security they’re going to have to pay for it. “Even though, we pay cellular companies for phone service and they still treat us like crap,” quipped Soghoian, which got quite a rise out of the 3,500-strong audience.
The conversation ended with Snowden bring it back to the 4th Ammendment of the Constitution, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure, asserting that the collection of data without people’s knowledge or consent as it has happened so far, must stop. “If data is being clandestinely acquired and the public doesn’t have the right to review it and it’s not legislatively authorized, or it’s not reviewed by the courts … that’s a problem. If we want to use that it must be resolved by a public debate.”
When asked would he do it again, he replied, “the answer is absolutely yes. Regardless of what happens to me, this is something I had to do. I took an oath to support and defend the constitution and I thought the constitution was violated on a massive scale.” This caused the majority of the audience to give him a standing ovation — it’s just too bad he wasn’t able to be there to see it.
