Edward Snowden Calls on Hackers to Help Whistleblowers Leak More Secrets

Edward Snowden made an impassioned call on Saturday for hackers and technologists to help would-be whistleblowers spill more government secrets.

Speaking via remote Google Hangouts video feed from Russia, Snowden addressed his comments to an audience at this weekend's Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference at the Pennsylvania Hotel in New York.

Arguing that "technology empowers dissent" as well as "democracy," Snowden said that the only way to enable whistleblowers is to give them better tools to pass secrets to journalists, protecting their communications, their identities and preventing them from going to jail for it.

To do that, Snowden said, he needed the help of the hackers, coders and developers gathered in the crowded rooms of the conference, as well as the ones watching via live stream online.

"We the people, you the people, you in this room right now have both the means and capabilities to help build a better future by encoding our rights into the programs and protocols upon which we rely everyday," he said during a conversation with Daniel Ellsberg, who himself became a whistleblower when he leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971.

Snowden also confirmed, as he hinted in his recent Guardian interview, that he plans to work on building those kinds of technologies, although he didn't give any more details.

His optimistic plea for better, more secure technology was echoed by Ellsberg, who encouraged both people in government as well as those working at corporations to come forward and expose crimes and corruption in other words: to start leaking secrets.

"We need more whistle blowers [] and you people have to do what you can to make it possible," Ellsberg said, specifically citing projects like SecureDrop, the WikiLeaks-style platform created by the late Aaron Swartz. Ellsberg, however, also warned that there will always be risks in leaking secrets, and people will just need to accept them.

The conversation between Ellsberg and Snowden was highly anticipated, with all the conference rooms at the Pennsylvania Hotel filled with people watching the two leakers on screens put up by the organizers.

However, the discussion wasn't limited to Snowden's call to action. At one point, Snowden said that he had bad short-term memory, and joked that "a lifetime with memes and lolcats will do that to you." Toward the end of the event, addressing the crowd, he said he believed that there are people from the NSA in the [conference event] room right now.

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Edward Snowden Calls on Hackers to Help Whistleblowers Leak More Secrets