Edward Snowden Legal Defense Official Launch in Berlin: COURAGE Foundation
In this video Luke Rudkowski talks to Sarah Harrison the acting director of the Courage Foundation at the official launch of the Edward Snowden defense fund ...

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Edward Snowden Legal Defense Official Launch in Berlin: COURAGE Foundation - Video

ACLU: One Year Later, Edward Snowden Discovers U.S. Government #39;s Secret
Subscribe to Upworthy: http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=upworthy One year ago, the world had never heard of Edward Snowden, and we knew very little about the breathtaking...

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ACLU: One Year Later, Edward Snowden Discovers U.S. Government's Secret - Video

The Washington Post has a pretty fascinating piece looking at how the FBI, the CIA, the State Department and other agencies spent weeks trying and failing to catch Edward Snowden after he fled to Hong Kong and eventually landed in Russia. As Greg Millers reporting makes clear, the United States kept waiting for Snowden to miscalculate and expose himself to being apprehended, but it never happened.

The best play for us is him landing in a third country, White House homeland security adviser Lisa Monacosaid of the agencies strategy, according to an official who spoke with Miller. We were hoping he was going to be stupid enough to get on some kind of airplane, and then have an ally say: Youre in our airspace. Land.

At one point, the FBI enlisted the help of Snowdens father, who eventually stopped cooperating after he concluded that the U.S. was trying to depict his son as a traitor:

From the outset, the pursuit of Snowden was led by the FBI. Lon Snowden, the fugitives father, said FBI agents descended on his house within hours after a video of his son identifying himself as the source of the NSA leaks appeared on the Web site of the British news outlet the Guardian.

I spoke to them approximately four hours on the 10th of June, Lon Snowden said. Later, the FBI offered to send the elder Snowden to Moscow as part of an effort to deliver a scripted pitch to his son to turn himself in and return home. A former officer in the Coast Guard, Lon Snowden was initially cooperative with the bureau but became angered as his son was depicted by U.S. officials as a traitor.

I came to know that they were not functioning in good faith and turned down the trip, Snowden said.

Snowdens exact location continues to evade security officials, even as he speaks with journalists and make public media appearances:

Others said the United States lacks answers to even basic questions about Snowdens circumstances, including where he lives and perhaps most important the role of the Russian security service, the FSB, in his day-to-day life.

Asked whether the United States knows Snowdens location, a U.S. official regularly briefed on the matter said, Thats not our understanding.

The gaps persist despite Snowdens ability tomeet with U.S. journalists in Moscowand make high-profile appearances, including during a call-in show with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

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In March, the worlds most famous whistleblower Edward Snowden chatted with a Ted audience in Vancouver using a $16,000 Beam a telepresence robot that is essentially a screen on a stick on wheels which can be operated remotely. After an official Q&A on stage with Ted founder Chris Anderson, the U.S. governments highly-wanted man drove around and chatted with attendees including Googles Sergey Brin. To prepare for the presentation, Ted organizers had sent a Beam to the American Civil Liberties Office in New York, so that Snowdens lead lawyer, Ben Wizner, could test it out and make sure it worked before it made its debut on stage. The ACLU still has that Beam, allowing Snowden to pop in and drive around the office, as mentioned by German reporter Julia Prosinger in a profile of the Snowden team. Her report ends dramatically; while talking with Snowden via Skype, the flickering screen caused her to have an epileptic seizure, which Snowden treated from afar, familiar with a condition he also has.

The telepresence robot is a disruptive technology that is a profound response to exile, said Ben Wizner. You assume its just going to be Skype on wheels, but its actually much more intimate than that for both the person operating it and for the people in the room with it because the camera is so good and because it moves independently. Like Snowden himself, who is confined to Russia, the bot doesnt have much freedom. Snowden is not wandering the streets of Manhattan in it. Thus far, the Beam has stayed at the ACLU in New York; Snowden can drop in and drive around, to speak to employees there or stare out a window at the Statue of Liberty which is within view from the financial district digs.

Wizner said he would like to get more Beams; hed like to send one to University of Glasgow in Scotland for example where Snowden is currently serving a three-year term as a student rector. We wanted to have a Beam with robes there to accept it, said Wizner.

As to how often the Beam gets used, Wizner said sometimes. People gather and he speaks. I was on a conference call once and he just rolled around the office for 45 minutes, and went into [ACLU civil liberty attorney] Jameel Jaffers office to talk about [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act], said Wizner. He mainly likes going on the Beam to thank people and interact with people who have helped him.

As for the security of the device, the Beam needs wi-fi for connectivity and then uses end-to-end encryption for calls. But the pilot station, (a.k.a. Snowden on his laptop) connects through a cloud supported by Suitable Technologies, which makes the device, to make contact with the Beam in the ACLU office.

According to a user manual, Beam call data is encrypted using AES-256 in CTR mode, and authenticated using HMAC-SHA1. Encryption and decryption happen at the call endpoints, so if relays are used they only process encrypted data. The manual warns, because the infrastructure establishes the trust relationship between the device and the pilot station, a compromised infrastructure would be able to carry out a man-in-the-middle attack; it encourages anyone worried about that to contact Suitable Technologies support.

Earlier this year, before the Snowden bot was a reality, I spoke to Scott Hassan, the CEO of Suitable Technologies. We did not put a record button on the Beam. We want it to be ephemeral, like a normal conversation, he told me. The line in between the connection points is encrypted. Privacy is important to us.

He joked that it would take the NSA to break in. We have not been contacted by the NSA to give them a back door, he added more seriously. Though they did contact us about using Beams internally.

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Edward Snowden Can be in United States via A Robot