Snowden: think like ‘worst people on Earth’ to outwit NSA

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden who was responsible for blowing the whistle and exposing surveillance programmes run by the US and UK governments has implored hackers to focus more of their efforts on creating anti-surveillance technologies.

Speaking via video link from Moscow to the audience at the Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) conference in New York this weekend, Snowden said that he intends to devote his time to promoting technologies that allow people to communicate anonymously and encrypt their messages. At the same time, he encouraged others to do the same.

"If you let go of your rights for a moment, you've lost them for a lifetime, and this is why this matters -- we didn't know about it [the surveillance], we weren't told about it." Describing the surveillance programmes set up by the US government as "a fundamentally un-American thing", he then proceeded to explain to the hackers, many of whom consider him to be a hero, how they can help fight back against what we now know to be "the new truth of our world".

"I think we the people, you the people, you in this room right now have both the means and the capability to help build a better future by encoding our rights into the programs and protocols on which we rely every day. And that's what my future work is going to be involved in and I hope you will join me and the Freedom of the Press Foundation and every other organisation in making that happen."

When asked to explain what tools needed to be developed and how people should use them, Snowden said that while the level of protection required varied dramatically from person to person, there were still basic rules that should be abided by. "Generally when I talk about this, I say encryption, encryption, encryption, because it is an important first step that denies the government access to anything typically more than suspicion which is drawn from association."

Snowden, who is now on the board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, explained that encryption for journalists in particular should only be seen as the first step, as that association is capable of betraying them completely. It's important to remember, he says that when it comes to how governments work out who their adversaries are, "the same techniques they use to discover spies, they use to discover journalists".

He praised some of the tools already out there, including Tor and PGP, but said that the hacking community needed to work together to peer review any systems that are built up by attacking them and "work as adversaries to find holes so we can fix them".

User experience also needs to significantly improve to make tools easier to use, he said. "We need encryption, mixed routing, we need non-attributable communications or un-attributable internet access that's available to people, that's easy, that's transparent, that's reliable -- that we can use not just here in the United States, but around the world, because again this a global problem."

The dangers posed by surveillance and the attacks against anti-surveillance technologies are only going to get worse, he added, before imploring the "grad students of the world to fix this thing". The trick is, he says, "to think like the worst people on Earth" and consider how they will unpick the systems that are built. "The techniques are only limited by our imagination."

Snowden has now been in Russia for over a year and earlier this month made a request to extend his Russian visa, which expires at the end of July. The US has requested that Snowden be extradited to face criminal charges, but given the past and current tensions between the two countries, it is unlikely that Russia will acquiesce to Washington's demands anytime soon.

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Snowden: think like 'worst people on Earth' to outwit NSA