Snowden said his leaks have made the US safer.

Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden spoke via internet link on a panel at the South by Southwest Conference (SXSW) in Austin today. If you were hoping for fresh revelations, or probing questions about his motivations and decisions, you would have been disappointed.

Staff writer

Dan Murphy is a staff writer for the Monitor's international desk, focused on the Middle East.Murphy, who has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, and more than a dozen other countries, writes and edits Backchannels. The focus? War and international relations, leaning toward things Middle East.

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His fellow panelists were Ben Wizner and Chris Sogohian of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), but Mr. Snowden, sitting in front of a screen with the US Constitution emblazoned across it, was the star of the show.

What did Mr. Snowden, currently residing in Russia to avoid arrest at home, have to say?

1. Public oversight.

Snowden said the US needs some new kind of "public oversight" of its intelligence community. "We need a watchdog that watches Congress, because if we're not informed, we can't consent to these (government) policies," he said.

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Listening to Edward Snowden at SXSW - CSMonitor.com

Tech Security Edward Snowden speaks via video conference from Russia at SXSW Interactive in Austin, Tex. on March 10, 2014 Harry McCracken / TIME

Of all the hundreds of interviews, panels and other conversations happening at South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, perhaps the most newsworthy one features somebody who didnt make the trek to Austin. He had a good excuse: Hes NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who landed in Russia after releasing documents to reporters.

Snowden appeared via a videocast with Ben Wizner and Chris Soghoian of the ACLU, with questions submitted from the public via Twitter. It was also broadcast in two overflow rooms as well as over the Internet via livestream.

Technically, the video conference wasnt impressive the image was choppy and the audio was muddy, perhaps because they were routed through multiple proxies in the interest of security but it was still compelling. It was, after all, one of the few opportunities weve had to hear from Snowden directly. And he appeared before a green-screen image of the U.S. Constitution a tart, unspoken response to his critics.

Why did Snowden choose to speak before SXSW Interactives audience of techies? Theyre the folks who really fix things, who can enforce our rights through technological standards, even when Congress hasnt taken steps, he told Wizner. The NSA and its counterparts in other countries, he said, are setting fire to the future of the internet. You guys that are in the room are all the firefighters. We need you to help fix this.

Snowden emphasized that he isnt opposed to government monitoring of individuals suspected of crimes, but he said that mass surveillance makes such targeting harder, not easier. He pointed out that the U.S. government failed to adequately act on warnings it received about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the brothers accused in the Boston Marathon bombings, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called underwear bomber.

We didnt actually investigate this guy, he said of Abdulmutallab. We spent all of this time hacking into Google and Facebooks back ends. What did we get? We got nothing.

The tone of the discussion wasnt all bleak. Snowdens revelations have led companies such as Google and Yahoo to bolster their security measures, which helps protect online data from being watched by government eyes. But he said that encryption is still too tricky a subject for average consumers, especially when it involves nerdy products and services such as the Tor encrypted browser.

Speaking of the difficulty that reporter Glenn Greenwald had installing and using PGP encryption software when Snowden wanted to provide him with documents, Snowden said, We want secure services that arent opt-in it has to pass the Glenn Greenwald test. This is something that people have to be able to access, and really the way we interact with it isnt good.

Its a really complicated subject matter today, and thats the difficulty, Snowden said.

Link:
SXSW: Edward Snowden Talks Privacy and Security - TIME

Can SXSW do better? A Kansas congressman thinks so.

Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) wrote an open letter to the organizers of the film, music and technology conference in Austin, Texas, asking them to axe whistleblower Edward Snowdens talk on Monday.

In the letter, Pompeo, who is a member of the House intelligence panel, sarcastically called Russia the beacon of First Amendment freedoms and suggestsSnowden is appearing to soak in the spotlight and pursue the agenda of his new overlords.

RELATED: EDWARD SNOWDEN TO SPEAK AT SXSW FROM RUSSIA

Certainly an organization of your caliber can attract experts on these topics with knowledge superior to a man who was hired as a systems administrator, wrote Pompeo on March 6.

Snowden, who is exiled in Russia, is scheduled to speak to conference-goers about national security and surveillance through a video conference titled A Virtual Conversation with Edward Snowden.

By allowing Snowden, who Pompeo described as a treasonous fugitive, to speak, the appearance will validate his behavior and actions of stealing thousands of classified documents, handing them over to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras on a thumb drive, and then fleeing to Russia.

RELATED: WIKILEAKS FOUNDER HINTS AT 'UPCOMING' INFO LEAK

In the letter, Pompeo says the conference will only be a softball interview, and gives a common criminal and traitor a venue to stay in the good graces of his new home nation, he wrote.

Once Snowden ends his outreach shaming the U.S., he stops being useful to the Kremlin, he says.

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Kansas Congressman: Cut Edward Snowden from SXSW schedule ...

Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who has leaked large amounts of classified information about the agency's electronic surveillance programs, spoke via video to a sympathetic audience at South By Southwest Interactive on Monday.

Snowden, who is wanted for prosecution in the U.S., was in Russia, where he's been given temporary asylum. Repeating things he's said before, Snowden declared Monday that he would do what he did all over again because he had seen the Constitution being "violated on a massive scale."

The Obama administration disagrees, though Snowden's revelations did begin a process that earlier this year led the president to say he wants the NSA to stop holding on to massive amounts of "metadata" about the phone calls and electronic communications of millions of people around the world.

We posted some highlights from Snowden's comments. As you'll see, he faced no tough questions.

Earlier today, All Tech Considered previewed his SXSW appearance.

Update at 1:02 p.m. ET. Would He Do It Again? "Absolutely Yes":

The last question to Snowden is about whether he would do what he's done again. "Absolutely yes," he says, adding that he "took an oath to support and defend the Constitution and I saw the Constitution ... being violated on a massive scale."

The surveillance programs, he adds, take the Constitution's prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures and turn it into "any seizure is fine, just don't search it."

Update at 12:59 p.m. ET. The Problem With Contractors:

Snowden has worked both inside the government and for contractors outside it. The problem with contractors, he says, is that "they aren't accountable."

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Edward Snowden Tells SXSW He'd Leak Those Secrets Again

Edward Snowden accused the NSA and its counterparts of "setting fire to the future of the Internet" during a videoconference discussion at South by Southwest in Texas on Monday, and he called on the tech community members in the audience to be "the firefighters."

Snowden spoke remotely from Russia, where he received asylum when he fled the United States last year after leaking classified government surveillance documents to journalists including Glenn Greenwald.

His 11 a.m. CT appearance at SXSW, a technology and music festival in Austin, Tex., were his most public comments since the leaks. The Texas Tribune livestreamed the Snowden event.

Snowden, who appeared in front of a greenscreen displaying the U.S. Constitution, explained that he chose popular tech confab SXSW as the platform for his talk because "the tech community ... they're the folks who can really fix things, who can enforce our rights."

Snowden characterized the NSA's surveillance program, as well as similar programs from governments around the globe, as "setting fire to the future of the Internet."

"The people in this room are all the firefighters," Snowden said, addressing the SXSW audience. "We need you to help us fix this."

"The people in this room are all the firefighters. We need you to help us fix this."

Also on the panel was Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union, who agreed with Snowden on his call to action.

"We need to lock things down," Soghoian said. "We need to make services secure out of the box. It's going to require a rethink from developers."

Snowden spent most of his portion of the talk stressing a point he has made in past comments: He has a problem with unfocused mass surveillance, not targeted monitoring of specific suspects' activity.

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Snowden: NSA 'Set Fire' to Internet, Techies Are 'Firefighters'

AUSTIN National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden blasted the U.S. government Monday for "setting fire to the future of the Internet" with its massive data-collection program that has triggered a worldwide debate over online snooping.

"The result has been an adversarial Internet," Snowden, speaking by video link from Russia where he was granted asylum from pending U.S. espionage charges last year, told attendees at the South by Southwest Interactive conference. "It's nothing we asked for. ... It's not something we wanted."

"The people in this room are all firefighters," Snowden said. "We all need your help to fix this."

Snowden challenged the tech community to bolster encryption software that will make Internet communications more secure, criticizing companies such as Google, Yahoo and others for not doing enough to protect customers' privacy because their business models were based on unsecured networking. "The good news is that there are solutions," he said.

Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union and a panelist at the forum, said U.S. firms that transmit "need to lock things down ... We need to make services secure out of the box. It's going to require a rethink from developers."

Speaking in front of a backdrop displaying the U.S. Constitution, Snowden challenged U.S. lawmakers who claim his leaks of secret documents have damaged U.S. security. Instead, he insisted that his actions have improved it, along with championing the online privacy of U.S. citizens who he said should be able to open e-mails or take cell phone calls without fear of being monitored.

Snowden contended U.S. interests have suffered "tremendous intelligence failures because we've been monitoring everybody's communications rather than suspects," including tips concerning accused Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev and accused underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab that were never followed-up by authorities.

"What did we get from bulk collections?" Snowden said. "We got nothing."

Snowden specifically criticized U.S. intelligence chief James Clapper for "cheering" on the NSA's data-collection program, rather than holding it accountable. "The overseers aren't interested in oversight," he said.

The session moderated by Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Speech, Privacy & Technology Project and Snowden's legal advisor had been criticized in recent days by U.S. Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kansas, who claimed Snowden's "only apparent qualification is his willingness to steal from his own government and then flee to that beacon of First Amendment freedoms, the Russia of Vladimir Putin."

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Snowden: NSA data-collection 'setting fire' to Internet future

Aryeh Neier at SPP - Edward Snowden: Surveillance, Secrecy and Disclosure
The talk will discuss and provide answers to three questions: First, are the surveillance programs of the National Security Agency disclosed by Snowden appro...

By: SPP CEU

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Aryeh Neier at SPP - Edward Snowden: Surveillance, Secrecy and Disclosure - Video

By Josh Rubin, CNN

updated 5:34 AM EST, Wed March 5, 2014

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Austin, Texas (CNN) -- Even though he can't set foot in the United States for fear of arrest, fugitive National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden has joined the speakers' roster at this year's South by Southwest Interactive Festival.

Snowden, who fled the United States in June with thousands of top-secret documents, will appear via teleconference Monday from Russia for a discussion about how the tech community must defend itself against mass surveillance.

Snowden will chat with Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist with the American Civil Liberties Union's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.

"The conversation will be focused on the impact of the NSA's spying efforts on the technology community and the ways in which technology can help to protect us from mass surveillance," an SXSW news release says.

Audience members will be allowed to ask questions, and The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit media organization, intends to livestream the session.

Josh Baer, a tech entrepreneur who has been attending the festival for more than 15 years, said he is excited to hear what Snowden has to say.

"The news and the government each have so many different perspectives," Baer said. "It's always refreshing to get it straight from the source."

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Fugitive and whistleblower Edward Snowden to speak at SXSW ...

(gigaom.com) -- NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has sent testimony (PDF) to a European Parliament inquiry about the mass surveillance activities he exposed particularly as they relate to the monitoring of Europeans and his motives for doing so.

In the long-awaited testimony, Snowden said he had raised his concerns about bulk surveillance to more than ten distinct officials, none of whom took any action to address them, before he approached journalists. He also insisted he had no relationship with either the Russian or Chinese governments, but confirmed he had been approached by the secret service in Russia, where he has temporary asylum.

Even the secret service of Andorra would have approached me, if they had had the chance: thats their job, Snowden wrote. But I didnt take any documents with me from Hong Kong, and while Im sure they were disappointed, it doesnt take long for an intelligence service to realize when theyre out of luck.

None of the testimony was new information as such, because Snowden was loath to pre-empt the stories of the journalists to whom he has given NSA and GCHQ documents. Much of it was a restatement of his belief that mass surveillance programs are entirely unjustified and a waste of resources that could be spent running down real leads.

That said, Snowden did provide a useful summation of the stories that have come out about the NSA network of partnerships with European intelligence agencies. He said the NSA helped these agencies find and exploit loopholes in their national privacy laws, or repeal restrictions. Combined with the NSAs deals with the companies that run major telecommunications cables, this ultimately lets the NSA spy on everyone:

The result is a European bazaar, where an EU member state like Denmark may give the NSA access to a tapping center on the (unenforceable) condition that NSA doesnt search it for Danes, and Germany may give the NSA access to another on the condition that it doesnt search for Germans. Yet the two tapping sites may be two points on the same cable, so the NSA simply captures the communications of the German citizens as they transit Denmark, and the Danish citizens as they transit Germany, all the while considering it entirely in accordance with their agreements. Ultimately, each EU national governments spy services are independently hawking domestic accesses to the NSA, GCHQ, FRA, and the like without having any awareness of how their individual contribution is enabling the greater patchwork of mass surveillance against ordinary citizens as a whole.

The former analyst said there were many other undisclosed programs that would impact EU citizens rights, but he would leave decisions over their potential disclosure to responsible journalists in coordination with government stakeholders.

Snowden added that he does seek asylum in the EU, but no member state has agreed to take him. Parliamentarians in the national governments have told me that the U.S., and I quote, will not allow EU partners to offer political asylum to me, which is why the previous resolution on asylum ran into such mysterious opposition. I would welcome any offer of safe passage or permanent asylum, but I recognize that would require an act of extraordinary political courage.

I know the good and the bad of these systems, and what they can and cannot do, and I am telling you that without getting out of my chair, I could have read the private communications of any member of this committee, as well as any ordinary citizen, Snowden wrote. I swear under penalty of perjury that this is true.

The timing of this testimony is crucial, as it comes days before the European Parliament considers what to do with a draft report that calls for the suspension of the so-called Safe Harbor agreement. This agreement allows U.S. web firms to self-certify that they adhere to EU-grade data protection laws, and Snowdens revelations have cast major doubts on its effectiveness.

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Edward Snowden tells European Parliament how local spies ...

Rep. Mike Pompeo doesnt want Edward Snowden on the schedule at South by Southwest, and hes taking the events planners to task for inviting him in the first place.

In a letter from Pompeos office, he requested the NSA leakers invitation to speak via telecast at the annual Texas event be withdrawn, lest it encourage lawless behavior among attendees.

Mr. Snowdens appearance would stamp the imprimatur of your fine organization on a man who ill deserves such accolades, the Kansas Republican wrote. Rewarding Mr. Snowdens behavior in this way encourages the very lawlessness he exhibited.

Snowden is set to appear at the Austin festival Monday at 11 a.m. for a discussion about personal privacy and surveillance with American Civil Liberties Union technologist Christopher Soghoian. The conversation will focus on the National Security Agencys activities, and audience members will have a chance to ask Snowden questions.

Pompeo, who is a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, wrote that the inclusion of Snowden in the events lineup undermines the very fairness and freedom that SXSW and the ACLU purport to foster.

I strongly urge you to withdraw this invitation, he wrote.

Pompeo outlined grievances against Snowden, such as caring more about personal fame than the cause he represents, and giving real whistleblowers a bad name. Snowden remains in exile in Russia.

Certainly an organization of your caliber can attract experts on these topics with knowledge superior to a man who was hired as a systems administrator and whose only apparent qualification is his willingness to steal from his own government and then flee to that beacon of First Amendment freedoms, the Russia of Vladimir Putin, Pompeo wrote.

In an announcement earlier this month, the events interactive director Hugh Forrest wrote that surveillance and online privacy looked to be one of the biggest topics of conversation 2014 festival.

As organizers, SXSW agrees that a healthy debate with regards to the limits of surveillance is vital to the future of the online ecosystem, Forrest wrote.

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SXSW 2014: Mike Pompeo wants Edward Snowden off the bill ...