NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden says UK surveillance law "defies belief"
PROVIDED BY http://CNNNEXT.COM The NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has condemned the new surveillance bill being pushed through the UK #39;s parliament this week.

By: giovanni betances

The rest is here:
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden says UK surveillance law "defies belief" - Video

Edward Snowden during his interview (Photo: Alan Rusbridger for the Guardian)NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden gave a video interview to the Guardian this week to discuss the state of internet privacy, the changing landscape of investigative journalism, and what his life has been like since he released the classified documents last year that exposed the U.S. government's global surveillance program. In one of the more poignant moments of the interview, Snowden spoke thoughtfully and bluntly about what his future might be if he leaves asylum in Russia and returns home to the U.S.

"If I end up in chains in Guantanamo," Snowden told his interviewers, "I can live with that."

Snowden also called on lawyers, journalists, doctors, and others who handle sensitive information to use alternative "zero-knowledge" security software and search engines that would protect confidentiality of sources and clients online better than Skype, Dropbox, or Google, for example. In some cases, he said, the big companies are actively anti-privacy, noting that Dropbox just added surveillance advocate Condoleezza Rice to their board of directors and calling them a "wannabe PRISM partner."

Technology can be useful for privacy, he said, as long as we don't "sleepwalk" into accepting new apps. "We shouldn't trust them without verifying what their activities are, how they're using our data, and deciding for ourselves whether it's appropriate where they draw the lines," he said.

Google and Skype have been useful for hosting public chats and interviews, Snowden said, but he would never rely on them in his personal life.

Currently, with a lack of reliable privacy software and the consequences of unlimited government power, journalism has become "immeasurably harder," Snowden said. The first contact with a source, "before encrypted communications are established, is enough to give it all away." He said new training for professionals who handle private information is necessary to ensure safety for the "average member of our society," particularly as technical literacy has become "a rare and precious resource."

There should be no distinction between digital information and printed or spoken information, Snowden said. "If we confess something to our priest inside a church, that would be private, but is it any different if we send our pastor a private email confessing a crisis that we have in our life?"

Before leaking the NSA documents to the public, Snowden said he first tried to address the matters that concerned him internally, asking colleagues and supervisors about the more nefarious elements of the program.

"I said, 'What do you think about this? Isn't this unusual? How can we be doing this? Isn't this unconstitutional? Isn't this a violation of rights?'" he recalled.

He was particularly worried about the fact that the many of the NSA's invasive systems were used for fun. Snowden described a troubling work environment where unlimited access to private information was regularly taken advantage of by individual employees. If the surveillance program happened to pick up a person's nude photographs, for example, co-workers would distribute them around the office, where a culture of lax supervision meant that no one was ever held responsible.

More:
Edward Snowden: 'If I End Up in Chains in Guantanamo, I Can Live With That'

In a lengthy interview with the Guardian, NSA whistle blower Edward Snowden spoke with editor Alan Rusbridger about his extraordinary rise to infamy. Currently in exile in Russia, he talked about how he disseminated documents about the activities of the NSA to numerous countries: "Once you start splitting them over jurisdictions and things like that it becomes much more difficult to subvert their intentions. Nobody could stop it". He remains defiant. He may be an outlaw but "its been vindicating to see the reaction from lawmakers, judges, public bodies around the world, civil liberties activists who have said its true that we have a right to at least know the broad outlines of what our governments doing in our name and what its doing against us".

He explains how during his time working as an NSA analyst, he learned about previous surveillance programs run under George W Bush. Programs that were deemed unconstitutional and, having been closed, forced the US government to assume new executive powers that were then used "against the citizenry of its own country". For Snowden the power of the state is worrying:

So when we think about the nation we think about our country, we think about our home, we think about the people living in it and we think about its values. When we think about the state, were thinking about an institution. The distinction there is that we now have an institution that has become so powerful it feels comfortable granting itself new authorities, without the involvement of the country, without the involvement of the public, without the full involvement of all of our elected representatives and without the full involvement of open courts, and thats a terrifying thing.

The ever shrinking costs of technology is cited as a reason to further fear the surveillance programs. When it becomes cheaper to store data than it is to sift through it and work out what is actually valuable, it is held onto for a long time. The NSA, for instance, is able to hang onto information about individuals for five years before having to apply for an extension. While there has been an outpouring of global disgust at Snowden's revelations, he feels the backlash against the government would be even stronger if the impact of surveillance programs were better understood.

You have a tremendous population of young military enlisted individuals who, while thats not a discredit to them, may not have had the number of life experiences to have felt the sense of being violated. And if we havent been exposed to the dangers and risks of having our privacy violated, having our liberties violated, how can we expect these individuals to reasonably represent our own interests in exercising those authorities?

It has long been alleged that the internet companies who have decried the NSA have actually been willing partners. Snowden says that the financial arrangements that exist between surveillance agencies and internet and telecommunication companies is kept entirely secret -- "at a much greater level than for example the names of human agents operating undercover, embedded with terrorist groups".

Talk about the NSA has become so commonplace that it is easy to forget the huge numbers of entirely innocent people whose privacy has been invaded in recent years -- and Snowden insists that the big names have been (maybe still are being) fully compliant.

Agencies are provided with direct access to the contents of the server at these private companies. What it means is Facebook is allowing the government to get copies of your Facebook messages, your Skype conversations, your Gmail mailboxes, things like that.

It seems there is not really a need to be concerned that the government is hacking into private accounts, rather than access is being openly provided on demand.

Link:
Snowden: Facebook is allowing the government to see your messages

Edward Snowden singled out cloud-storage provider Dropbox for lacking security measures he says would protect users from government snooping. He then plugged smaller competitor SpiderOak, which he says does.

In aninterview with The Guardian published Thursday afternoon, the former National Security Agency contractor said Dropbox is hostile to privacy because it controls the encryption keys, making it capable of handing over user data stored on its servers to the government.

He also fixated on the startups hiring of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as a board member, though its not clear she has any role in shaping the companys privacy policy.

Safeguarding our users information is a top priority at Dropbox, a Dropbox spokeswoman said in an email. Weve made a commitment in our privacy policy to resist broad government requests, and are fighting to change laws so that fundamental privacy protections are in place for users around the world.

But Snowden said users should instead use SpiderOak, a storage startup which takes extra security measures such as not storing users passwords. That makes it difficult for the government to access any user data, even with a court order.

More than a year after he leaked classified documents on the U.S. National Security Agencys programs to monitor phone calls, email and other communications, Snowden is urging tech companies to adopt stronger methods of privacy protection. Some of the documents he leaked helped sway Internet giants like Google and Yahoo to encrypt data passing between their servers and sparked a wave of startup innovation in the field of secure mobile messaging.

In cloud storage, as with other online services, adding greater privacy requires tradeoffs that could compromise ease of use or commercial viability for tech companies focused on making money.

Both Dropbox and its storage rival Box already encrypt data in transit between servers and while its at rest on their servers. But neither goes the extra step of SpiderOak, one of a handful of companies pitching cloud storage that is subpoena-proof, meant as a deterrent against the National Security Agency and other spy teams.

Heres how it works: SpiderOak has users encrypt data on their machines before they send it to the companys servers. The company maintains it keeps no readable version of users passwords or data.

The plus side: If a government asks SpiderOak for your data, all it can give them is a scramble of numbers and letters. The down side: If you forget your password, SpiderOak has no way of resetting it for you. (Users are allowed to leave hints with the company.)

Read more:
Snowden Says Drop Dropbox, Use SpiderOak