Monthly Archives: March 2014

WikiLeaks’ Assange talks NSA, hints at more leaks (Update)

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Mar 08, 2014 by Barbara Ortutay Fugitive WikLeaks founder Julian Assange speaks via Skype at the South By SouthWest Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, Saturday, March 8, 2014. Assange's appearance underscores the increasing attention that the technology industry is paying to issues of online privacy, security and surveillance. (AP Photo/Barbara Ortutay)

Fugitive WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, speaking over Skype from the Ecuadorean embassy in London, said his living situation is a bit like prisonwith a more lenient visitor policy.

He also hinted that new leaks are coming from WikiLeaks, though he gave no specifics on what these might be.

Assange, who has been confined to the embassy since June 2012, discussed government surveillance, journalism and the situation in Ukraine on Saturday in a streaming-video interview beamed to an audience of 3,500 attendees of the South By Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, Texas.

Assange's hour-long remote appearance was spiked with technical glitches. As the audio cut out, he sometimes asked audience members to raise their hands if they could hear him. Benjamin Palmer, the co-founder of marketing firm The Barbarian Group who interviewed Assange, at one point resorted to texting his questions.

Looking well-groomed in a white shirt, scarf and a black blazer, Assange blasted President Barack Obama's administration, saying it was not taking fellow secrets leaker Edward Snowden's revelations about the National Security Agency's surveillance activities seriously.

"We know what happens when the government is serious," he said. "Someone is fired, someone is forced to resign, someone is prosecuted, an investigation (is launched), a budget is cut. None of that has happened in the last eight months since the Edward Snowden revelations."

Assange's appearance at this five-day conferencewhich will host Snowden in a similar remote interview Monday from Russia which granted him temporary asylumsignal the growing concern in the tech community around issues of online privacy, surveillance and security, even as Internet giants like Google and Facebook reap billions in advertising revenue from collecting information about their users.

"Now that the Internet has merged with human society and human society has merged with the Internet, the laws of the Internet become the laws of society," Assange said, adding that the NSA's "penetration of the Internet" has led to a "military occupation" of civilian space.

Assange has taken asylum at the Ecuadorean embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden over a sexual assault charge, which he has said would be merely a first step in efforts to move him to the U.S. to face charges over publishing hundreds of thousands of secret government documents.

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WikiLeaks' Assange talks NSA, hints at more leaks (Update)

Snowden: His NSA leaks leave world ‘in a more secure place’ (+video)

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Fugitive Edward Snowden, speaking via webcast to Americans in Austin, Texas, said Monday his leaks about NSA surveillance programs led to better communications security, whereas NSA leaders' actions jeopardized national security.

An unrepentant Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who during the past year leaked thousands of top-secret documents to news organizations, on Monday refuted US officials' assertions that his revelations about America's mass-surveillance apparatus had damaged national security and said his acts had benefited the public worldwide.

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Mr. Snowden, a fugitive who has been granted temporary sanctuary in Russia, made his comments during his first live discussion with a US audience, conducted via Internet webcast. He said he would leak the information again, despite his exile.

Presumably speaking from Russia, Snowden also urged greater use of encryption in everyday online communications so as to combat mass surveillance by governments worldwide, and said his actions had already helped to buttress such efforts.

His immediate audience was a group of US technologists meeting in Austin, Texas, at the South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival. They interrupted Snowden with applause at several points as he laid out a defense of his actions, familiar to anyone who has read his "manifesto" or his recent testimony to the European Union.

When I went public with this, it wasnt so I could single-handedly change the government or tell them what to do or override what the public thinks is proper, he said. I wanted to inform the public so they could make a decision, [so] they could provide their consent for what we should be doing.

Two representatives from the American Civil Liberties Union, Ben Wizner and Chris Soghoian, tossed questions some of them softballs to Snowden via Twitter. At the start,Mr. Wizner noted that US Rep. Mike Pompeo (R) of Kansas had asked SXSW organizers to revoke their invitation to Snowden on grounds it would "encourage lawlessness." Conference organizers declined the request, Wizner said.

Snowden used the occasion to pointedly rebut congressional testimony by current National Security Agency director Keith Alexander and former NSA director Michael Hayden that his actions and news stories resulting from the document leaks had damaged US national security. They, not he, are the ones who harmed it, Snowden said.

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Snowden: His NSA leaks leave world 'in a more secure place' (+video)

Snowden speaks at SXSW

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STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Austin, Texas (CNN) -- In a rare public talk via the Web, fugitive NSA leaker Edward Snowden urged a tech conference audience Monday to help "fix" the U.S. government's surveillance of its citizens.

He spoke via teleconference from Russia to an audience of thousands at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin. The event marked the first time the former National Security Agency contractor has directly addressed people in the United States since he fled the country with thousands of secret documents last June.

In response to a question, Snowden said he had no regrets about his decision to leak the NSA documents, which showed the intelligence agency has conducted secret monitoring of Americans' phone and Internet behavior in the name of national security.

"Would I do it again? Absolutely. Regardless of what happens to me, this is something we had a right to," he said.

"I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution. And I saw the Constitution was being violated on a massive scale," he added, to applause from the 3,000 people in the auditorium at the Austin Convention Center.

"South by Southwest and the tech community, the people in the room in Austin, they're the folks who can fix this," Snowden said earlier. "There's a political response that needs to occur, but there's also a tech response that needs to occur."

He appeared on video screens with a copy of the U.S. Constitution as a backdrop. The live stream was slow, repeatedly freezing Snowden's image onscreen.

The pair of American Civil Liberties Union lawyers who hosted the discussion said Snowden's video, ultimately delivered via Google Hangouts, was streamed through several routers for security.

Snowden also said Internet users need more awareness, and better tools, to help them secure their online information from prying eyes.

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Snowden speaks at SXSW