Monthly Archives: March 2014

Edward Snowden calls for public oversight of U.S. spy …

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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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Edward Snowden Urges SXSW Crowd to Thwart NSA With …

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With lawmakers slow to pass legislation curbing NSA surveillance, its up to the technology community to step in and devise solutions that will better protect online communications from snoops, said Edward Snowden, speaking today from Moscow at the South by Southwest conference in Austin.

[T]he people who are in the room at Austin right now, theyre the folks who can really fix things, who can enforce our rights for technical standards even when Congress hasnt yet gotten to the point of creating legislation that protect our rights in the same manner, he said. Theres a policy response that needs to occur, but theres also a technical response that needs to occur. And its the makers, the thinkers, the developing community that can really craft those solutions to make sure were safe.

The massive surveillance being done by the NSA and other governments has created an adversarial internet, he said, a sort of a global free-fire zone for governments, thats nothing that we ever asked [for]; its not what we wanted. Its something we need to protect against.

[T]heyre setting fire to the future of the internet. And the people who are in this room now, you guys are all the firefighters. And we need you to help us fix this.

One solution he highlighted, that would make it more difficult for the U.S. and other governments to conduct passive surveillance, is the implementation of end-to-end encryption that would protect communications from user to user, rather than as its currently done by Google and other services, which only encrypt the communication from user to service, leaving it vulnerable to collection from the service provider.

End-to-end encryption makes mass surveillance impossible at the network level, he says, and provides a more constitutionally protected model of surveillance, because it forces the government to target the endpoints the individual users through hacking, rather than conduct mass collection.

Snowden, speaking through a Google Hangout session, masking his whereabouts through seven online proxies, appeared onscreen sitting in front of a backdrop of the Constitutions First Amendment likely a sly reference to a Kansas lawmakers attempt to bar Snowdens free speech by asking the conference organizers last week to cancel his talk.

Snowdens talk was broadcast online to more than 40,000 viewers as well as to a packed house and overflow rooms in Austin.

The interview was conducted by Ben Wizner, one of Snowdens attorneys and director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project, and Wizners colleague Chris Soghoian, principal technologist and a senior policy analyst for the same project.

Soghoian elaborated on the issue of technical security to protect digital civil liberties.

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Edward Snowden Urges SXSW Crowd to Thwart NSA With ...