Snowden: Big revelations to come, reporting them is not a crime

Snowden on stage at the TED 2014 conference in Vancouver on Tuesday.

Edward Snowden made a surprise appearance on the TED stage in Vancouver todayusing a Beam telepresence robot from "somewhere in Russia."

Snowden, in his second remote talk in eight days after an appearance at SXSW Interactive in Texas, urged online businesses to encrypt their websites immediately. "The biggest thing that an Internet company in America can do today, right now, without consulting lawyers, to protect users of the Internet around the world, is to enable Web encryption on every page you visit," he said. "If you look at a copy of 1984 on Amazon, the NSA can see a record of that, the Russians, the French canthe world's library is unencrypted. This is something we need to change, not just for Amazonall companies need to move to an encrypted browsing habit by default."

Snowden said the leaks from his document cache would continue. "There are absolutely more revelations to come," he said. "Some of the most important [publishing] to be done is yet to come."

He argued against personalizing his own role in leaking the documents to prompt debate. "Who I am really doesn't matter at all. If I'm the worst person in the world, you can hate me and move on. What really matters is the kind of Internet we want, the kind of relationship with society... I wouldn't use words like hero or traitor. I'm an American and a citizen."

"What Boundless Informant tells us is more communications are being intercepted in America by Americans than in Russia by Russians."

He said he struggled to find a way to leak the intelligence documents in as responsible a way as he could. "We did a lot of good things in the intelligence community. But there are also things that go too far... decisions made in secret without the public's awareness, the public's consent... When I really came to struggle with these issues, I thought to myself, how can I do these things in the most responsible way?" That was through responsible media. "The first amendment of the US constitution guarantees us a free pressto challenge the government but also to work together with the government, without putting our national security at risk. By working with journalists, by putting all of my information to the American people, we've had a robust debate with a deep investment by the US government, which is resulting in benefits for everyone." There has been no evidence "of even a single incident" whereby the leaks have caused harm.

He said the NSA's PRISM program allowed the US government to "deputize corporate America to do its dirty work for the NSA." "Much of the debate in the US [about PRISM] is it's just [about collecting] metadata. PRISM is about content. Even though some of these companies, Yahoo's one, challenged them in court, they all lostthey weren't tried by an open court but a secret court. Fifteen federal judges have reviewed these programs and found them to be lawful, but what they don't tell you is these are secret judges in secret courts of law." These courts had received 34,000 requests to access information and turned down just 11, he said. "These aren't the people we want deciding what the role of corporate America should be."

The NSA "intentionally misleads corporate partners," he said. One program, Bull Run, targeted America's own superstructure in dangerous ways, he said, after being dishonest to Internet companies. "They say, 'hey, we need to work with you to secure security systems.' In reality, they're giving bad advice to these companies. They're building in back doors. This is really dangerousif we lose the trust of something like SSL [encryption], which was specifically targeted, we won't be able to access banks, commerce, without worrying about people monitoring those communications."

"People should be able to pick up the phone and call their family, should be able to send a text message to their loved one, buy a book online, without worrying how this could look to a government possibly years in the future."

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Snowden: Big revelations to come, reporting them is not a crime