Edward Snowden at SXSW: Encryption is the answer to NSA surveillance

With an image of the U.S. Constitution as his background, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden beamed in through a choppy Google Hangouts video feed to call on the technologists at the 2014 South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, to help fix the problem of mass government surveillance through easy-to-use encryption technology.

I would say South by Southwest and the technology community the people who are in Austin right now theyre the folks who can really fix things, who can enforce our rights through technical standards even when Congress hasnt yet gotten to the point of creating legislation to protect our rights in the same manner, said Snowden in his opening remarks.

He added that, in addition to a policy response to mass surveillance activities, theres also a technical response. And its the makers, its the thinkers, its the development community that can really crack those solutions to make sure were safe.

You guys who are in the room now are all the firefighters, he said. And we need you to help fix this.

The bottom line is that encryption does work.

Soghoian said the lack of consideration for security and other encryption by developers is what has allowed widespread government surveillance to occur.

We need to make services secure out of the box, said Soghoian. And thats going to require a re-think by developers its going to require that developers think about security early on, rather than later on down the road.

Soghoian went on to add that, since the disclosures by Snowden, major technology companies have greatly improved their security offerings. Within the past eight months, for example, both Google and Yahoo have increased their use of SSL encryption by default for users. Despite these improvements, said Soghoian, the additional security still allows these companies to collect user data, which in turn allows the government to obtain user data from the companies something that is not likely to change thanks to their advertising-based business models that rely on users information.

The irony that were using Google Hangouts to talk to Snowden has not been lost on me or our team here, Soghoian said to applause. He also indicated that the video feed had been routed through several proxy serversfor security purposes (Wizner earlier indicated the exact number was seven, a possible allusion to this meme), which led to the poor quality of the video stream.

This in fact I think reflects the state of play for many services, said Soghoian. You have to choose between a service thats easy to use, reliable, and polished, or a tool that is highly secure and impossible for the average person to use.

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Edward Snowden at SXSW: Encryption is the answer to NSA surveillance