Snowden Urges Technology Companies To Adopt Better Encryption

By Dow Jones Business News, March 10, 2014, 03:51:00 PM EDT

By Douglas MacMillan and Danny Yadron

Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden urged technology companies to adopt better methods of encryption to protect users from government surveillance.

Speaking through a live video feed to an audience at the South By Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, Mr. Snowden said technology companies can act more quickly to protect users' privacy than the government, which will move slowly, if at all, to change intelligence-gathering practices. "There is a policy response that needs to occur but there is also a technical response that needs to occur," Mr. Snowden said.

Mr. Snowden also criticized the data-collection practices of technology companies such as Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. He said the companies collect too much data, primarily to generate advertising revenue, and hold it for too long.

The comments are among Mr. Snowden's first public remarks since last June, when he exposed the NSA's programs to monitor phone calls, email and other communications. He spoke from Moscow, where he has been granted temporary asylum, with an image of the Constitution in the background. Both the audience, and the interviewers--two officials of the American Civil Liberties Union--were sympathetic to Mr. Snowden.

Mr. Snowden's revelations prompted Google and other companies to strengthen their encryption technology, but he said the firms had not done enough to protect the civil liberties of Internet users in the U.S. and abroad.

Encryption turns plain text in an email into a jumble of letters and numbers unreadable to prying eyes--whether hackers or a spy agency. To read the email, another user requires a "key" to decrypt the message.

Mr. Snowden and Chris Soghoian, one of the interviewers and a principal technologist at the ACLU, said Internet companies should adopt a system known as "end-to-end encryption," which scrambles communication, such as an email, each step from the sender's computer to the recipient's.

Messrs. Snowden and Soghoian said widespread use of encryption would make it less practical for the government to collect Internet traffic in bulk, since much of it would be unreadable. That would require government agencies to target surveillance more precisely, Mr. Soghoian said.

Read the original here:
Snowden Urges Technology Companies To Adopt Better Encryption