Edward Snowden Calls on Hackers to Help Whistleblowers …

Edward Snowden poses for a photo during an interview at an undisclosed location in December 2013 in Moscow, Russia.

Image: Barton Gellman/Getty Images/Associated Press

By Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai2014-07-19 22:00:11 UTC

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.

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