Category Archives: Edward Snowden

The Most Famous Whistleblowers on Why They Leaked

Posted on by

The source for the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, joined former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in conversation.

Reuters

America's most famous whistleblowers, Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden, conversed with one another at a New York City hacker conference earlier this week. What follows is a condensed transcript highlighting a portion of their exchange on why they each decided to leak and why they identify with one another. The panel was moderated by Trevor Timm of Freedom of the Press Foundation. Unedited video of the whole conversation can be viewed via YouTube:

EDWARD SNOWDEN: To Dan Ellsberg, thank you for everything you've done, for your service both inside the government and outside the government, for everything you've done for our nation, our society. You have given so many so much, and told us the truth about what our government was doing at a time when the truth was very hard to get. And I have to say, I watched a documentary about your life as I was grappling with these issues myself. And it had a deep impact and really shaped my thinking. So thank you for everything that you've done.

TREVOR TIMM: I was hoping Dan could describe what it felt like the first time he heard about Edward Snowden: his feelings on seeing what he had given the world.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: I can tell you exactly what I felt: hope, which had not been in great supply for me... I felt that when Chelsea Manning was revealed. I used to ask myself, how often do you need a Pentagon Papers, which was a massive disclosure. One document doesn't do it, as Ed knows. They can say, 'Well we changed that the next day,' or, 'That was just some particular little department, some low level person.' So what you really need is a mass of stuff, as in the Pentagon Papers, that shows, no, this is what they said the next day and the day after that, and here's the official policy, and so forth. And I waited 40 years to hear that.

So I was losing hope that there would be anybody inside who was willing to risk his or her life and freedom, to put out what needed to be put out. Because if you put out a lot of stuff, technically you have to be something of a specialist to put out a lot of stuff and not be identified. So I was feeling not hopeful that it would come. And then just 3 years after Manning comes Snowden. So I was feeling that it is possible.

EDWARD SNOWDEN: You touched on technology. You talked about how people are able to use specialist skills to gather information that's tremendously important to the public. And they're able to publish that and get it around the world before anyone is able to stop itbefore they're able to kill the story, shut the public out of government, and divorce us from our democracy. The key to me is that technology empowers dissent. People forget this because they only think about the recent examples. They think about me. They think about Manning. But they forget that technology actually enabled you. People forget that you were in a garage with a Xerox machine. A copy machine might not seem like a killer app to a lot of people. But that enabled you to get this back to the public. And the same Xerox machine that gave you that gave us samizdat back in the former Soviet bloc. Its important to recognize that technology empowers individuals, it empowers voices, it empowers democracy, in a way that can turn one man into a movement or a woman into a world power. And that has fundamentally changed the way we related to our government and the way that our government relates to us.

TREVOR TIM: This next question is for you, Dan. Often times, Ed's biggest critics invoke your name in a positive way and try to contrast what you did with what Edward did. How does that make you feel? Do you agree or disagree with them?

DAN ELLSBERG: This bullshit in a way started with Barack Obama. When somebody took the occasion to ask him about Manning, and said, 'Didn't Chelsea Manning (then Bradley) do exactly what Ellsberg did?' he could've answered that various ways. What he said was, 'Ellsberg's material was classified in a different manner.' Well, that was true, in a way. Everything that Manning put out was Secret or less. And everything I put out was Top Secret. That was the difference. In Ed's case, it was all higher than Top Secret, which I earlier would have said shouldn't be put out, until you see what it says. Then you see it's evidence of criminality, and he should not be subject to prosecution for revealing it even though it is higher than top secret. I found that starting in 2010, thanks to Manning and now to you, I'm getting more favorable publicity than in 40 years. Suddenly people who were all for putting me in prison for life say that I'm a good guy, the good whistleblower.

Read the rest here:
The Most Famous Whistleblowers on Why They Leaked

Edward Snowden interview: ‘If I end up in chains, I can live with that’ | Channel 4 News – Video

Posted on by


Edward Snowden interview: #39;If I end up in chains, I can live with that #39; | Channel 4 News
Former American spy Edward Snowden, currently in exile in Moscow, reveals new details of what he claims are US intelligence abuses of personal data collected...

By: Channel 4 News

See more here:
Edward Snowden interview: 'If I end up in chains, I can live with that' | Channel 4 News - Video

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

Posted on by

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.

Go here to read the rest:
Snowden: think like 'worst people on Earth' to outwit NSA