Inside Edward Snowden’s Life as a Robot

Snowden appears via Beam bot in the ACLUs New York offices with (from left) journalist Laura Poitras, Freedom of the Press Foundation director Trevor Timm and security technologist Micah Lee. Photo: Courtesy of Freedom of the Press Foundation

Since he first became a household name a year ago, Edward Snowden has been a modern Max Headroom, appearing only as a face on a screen broadcast from exile in Hong Kong or Russia. But in the age of the telepresence robot, being a face on a screen isnt as restrictive as it used to be.

For at least the past three months, Snowden and his supporters have been experimenting with a Beam Pro remote presence system, a Wi-Fi-connected screen and camera on wheels that Snowden can use to communicate with the staffers in the New York office of the American Civil Liberties Union, according to his ACLU lawyer Ben Wizner. From a computer in Moscow, Snowden can turn on the video bot and wheel around the ACLUs office on a whim. And Snowdens supporters hope the Beam system might be the first of several that could bring the distant whistleblower into the room with colleagues around the world, partially erasing the isolation enforced by the Espionage Act charges awaiting him if he leaves the relative safety of Russia.

Hes used it to roll out into the hallway and generously interact with large numbers of ACLU staff, says Wizner. I think it can be a profound response to exile.

Snowdens Beam bot has been in the ACLU offices since before his TED talk in March, when he used the same $16,000 wheeled robot to speak on stage. Wizner says the TED organizers wanted to test the robot in New York before it was used at the Vancouver conference. They brought a couple models to the office, and gave us a login, says Wizner. We found that it worked really well.

Snowden can drive his in-office telepresence system with his keyboards arrow keys at around two miles an hour. It has an eight hour battery life before it needs to dock into a $950 charging station, and even comes with a party mode that activates more ambient microphones and elevates the volume of its speaker.

Edward Snowden is interviewed by TED Curator Chris Anderson via Beam during the 2014 TED conference. Photo: Steven Rosenbaum/Getty

Since its first appearance at TED, Snowdens Beam came into the spotlight again Wednesday in a story in the German newspaper Tagesspiegel. But while Tagesspiegel described Snowden as using the Beam system on a regular basis, Wizner says Snowdenbot has been a more occasional visitor to the ACLU office. Once, the non-profits executive director Anthony Romero gave the Snowden-possessed machine a walking tour of the building. Another time, Wizner had to jump on a phone call during a meeting with his whistleblower client. When he got off the phone, he found that Snowden had rolled the bot into civil liberties lawyer Jameel Jaffers office and was discussing the 702 provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It was kind of cool, Wizner says.1

Trevor Timm, the director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation where Snowden sits on the board, says Snowden had been interested in trying the telepresence bot even before his TED talk. He was telling people for a while that it could be this game-changing technology, says Timm. I dont think anyone quite believed him until we saw it in actionAll he needs is arms to open doors, and he can go wherever he wants.

Timm met with Snowden-as-robot last April, along with journalist and Snowden-chronicling filmmaker Laura Poitras. It lights up and he shows up on the screen, Timm describes. When it started moving towards us, everyone kind of jumped back.

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Inside Edward Snowden’s Life as a Robot