Edward Snowden Urges SXSW Crowd to Thwart NSA With …

With lawmakers slow to pass legislation curbing NSA surveillance, its up to the technology community to step in and devise solutions that will better protect online communications from snoops, said Edward Snowden, speaking today from Moscow at the South by Southwest conference in Austin.

[T]he people who are in the room at Austin right now, theyre the folks who can really fix things, who can enforce our rights for technical standards even when Congress hasnt yet gotten to the point of creating legislation that protect our rights in the same manner, he said. Theres a policy response that needs to occur, but theres also a technical response that needs to occur. And its the makers, the thinkers, the developing community that can really craft those solutions to make sure were safe.

The massive surveillance being done by the NSA and other governments has created an adversarial internet, he said, a sort of a global free-fire zone for governments, thats nothing that we ever asked [for]; its not what we wanted. Its something we need to protect against.

[T]heyre setting fire to the future of the internet. And the people who are in this room now, you guys are all the firefighters. And we need you to help us fix this.

One solution he highlighted, that would make it more difficult for the U.S. and other governments to conduct passive surveillance, is the implementation of end-to-end encryption that would protect communications from user to user, rather than as its currently done by Google and other services, which only encrypt the communication from user to service, leaving it vulnerable to collection from the service provider.

End-to-end encryption makes mass surveillance impossible at the network level, he says, and provides a more constitutionally protected model of surveillance, because it forces the government to target the endpoints the individual users through hacking, rather than conduct mass collection.

Snowden, speaking through a Google Hangout session, masking his whereabouts through seven online proxies, appeared onscreen sitting in front of a backdrop of the Constitutions First Amendment likely a sly reference to a Kansas lawmakers attempt to bar Snowdens free speech by asking the conference organizers last week to cancel his talk.

Snowdens talk was broadcast online to more than 40,000 viewers as well as to a packed house and overflow rooms in Austin.

The interview was conducted by Ben Wizner, one of Snowdens attorneys and director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project, and Wizners colleague Chris Soghoian, principal technologist and a senior policy analyst for the same project.

Soghoian elaborated on the issue of technical security to protect digital civil liberties.

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Edward Snowden Urges SXSW Crowd to Thwart NSA With ...