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Julian Assange Interview 2013 On Edward Snowden on #39;This Week #39; Asylum is a Right We All Have

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Edward Snowden and ACLU at SXSW
Take Action: https://www.aclu.org/immunity4snowden More information: https://www.aclu.org/nsa-surveillance Edward Snowden speaks about privacy and technology...

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Edward Snowden and ACLU at SXSW - Video

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Austin, Texas (CNN) -- In a rare public talk via the Web, fugitive NSA leaker Edward Snowden urged a tech conference audience Monday to help "fix" the U.S. government's surveillance of its citizens.

He spoke via teleconference from Russia to an audience of thousands at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin. The event marked the first time the former National Security Agency contractor has directly addressed people in the United States since he fled the country with thousands of secret documents last June.

In response to a question, Snowden said he had no regrets about his decision to leak the NSA documents, which showed the intelligence agency has conducted secret monitoring of Americans' phone and Internet behavior in the name of national security.

"Would I do it again? Absolutely. Regardless of what happens to me, this is something we had a right to," he said.

"I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution. And I saw the Constitution was being violated on a massive scale," he added, to applause from the 3,000 people in the auditorium at the Austin Convention Center.

"South by Southwest and the tech community, the people in the room in Austin, they're the folks who can fix this," Snowden said earlier. "There's a political response that needs to occur, but there's also a tech response that needs to occur."

He appeared on video screens with a copy of the U.S. Constitution as a backdrop. The live stream was slow, repeatedly freezing Snowden's image onscreen.

The pair of American Civil Liberties Union lawyers who hosted the discussion said Snowden's video, ultimately delivered via Google Hangouts, was streamed through several routers for security.

Snowden also said Internet users need more awareness, and better tools, to help them secure their online information from prying eyes.

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Edward Snowden calls for public oversight of U.S. spy ...

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 ...

Snowden said his leaks have made the US safer.

Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden spoke via internet link on a panel at the South by Southwest Conference (SXSW) in Austin today. If you were hoping for fresh revelations, or probing questions about his motivations and decisions, you would have been disappointed.

Staff writer

Dan Murphy is a staff writer for the Monitor's international desk, focused on the Middle East.Murphy, who has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, and more than a dozen other countries, writes and edits Backchannels. The focus? War and international relations, leaning toward things Middle East.

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His fellow panelists were Ben Wizner and Chris Sogohian of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), but Mr. Snowden, sitting in front of a screen with the US Constitution emblazoned across it, was the star of the show.

What did Mr. Snowden, currently residing in Russia to avoid arrest at home, have to say?

1. Public oversight.

Snowden said the US needs some new kind of "public oversight" of its intelligence community. "We need a watchdog that watches Congress, because if we're not informed, we can't consent to these (government) policies," he said.

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Listening to Edward Snowden at SXSW - CSMonitor.com

Tech Security Edward Snowden speaks via video conference from Russia at SXSW Interactive in Austin, Tex. on March 10, 2014 Harry McCracken / TIME

Of all the hundreds of interviews, panels and other conversations happening at South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, perhaps the most newsworthy one features somebody who didnt make the trek to Austin. He had a good excuse: Hes NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who landed in Russia after releasing documents to reporters.

Snowden appeared via a videocast with Ben Wizner and Chris Soghoian of the ACLU, with questions submitted from the public via Twitter. It was also broadcast in two overflow rooms as well as over the Internet via livestream.

Technically, the video conference wasnt impressive the image was choppy and the audio was muddy, perhaps because they were routed through multiple proxies in the interest of security but it was still compelling. It was, after all, one of the few opportunities weve had to hear from Snowden directly. And he appeared before a green-screen image of the U.S. Constitution a tart, unspoken response to his critics.

Why did Snowden choose to speak before SXSW Interactives audience of techies? Theyre the folks who really fix things, who can enforce our rights through technological standards, even when Congress hasnt taken steps, he told Wizner. The NSA and its counterparts in other countries, he said, are setting fire to the future of the internet. You guys that are in the room are all the firefighters. We need you to help fix this.

Snowden emphasized that he isnt opposed to government monitoring of individuals suspected of crimes, but he said that mass surveillance makes such targeting harder, not easier. He pointed out that the U.S. government failed to adequately act on warnings it received about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the brothers accused in the Boston Marathon bombings, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called underwear bomber.

We didnt actually investigate this guy, he said of Abdulmutallab. We spent all of this time hacking into Google and Facebooks back ends. What did we get? We got nothing.

The tone of the discussion wasnt all bleak. Snowdens revelations have led companies such as Google and Yahoo to bolster their security measures, which helps protect online data from being watched by government eyes. But he said that encryption is still too tricky a subject for average consumers, especially when it involves nerdy products and services such as the Tor encrypted browser.

Speaking of the difficulty that reporter Glenn Greenwald had installing and using PGP encryption software when Snowden wanted to provide him with documents, Snowden said, We want secure services that arent opt-in it has to pass the Glenn Greenwald test. This is something that people have to be able to access, and really the way we interact with it isnt good.

Its a really complicated subject matter today, and thats the difficulty, Snowden said.

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SXSW: Edward Snowden Talks Privacy and Security - TIME

Can SXSW do better? A Kansas congressman thinks so.

Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) wrote an open letter to the organizers of the film, music and technology conference in Austin, Texas, asking them to axe whistleblower Edward Snowdens talk on Monday.

In the letter, Pompeo, who is a member of the House intelligence panel, sarcastically called Russia the beacon of First Amendment freedoms and suggestsSnowden is appearing to soak in the spotlight and pursue the agenda of his new overlords.

RELATED: EDWARD SNOWDEN TO SPEAK AT SXSW FROM RUSSIA

Certainly an organization of your caliber can attract experts on these topics with knowledge superior to a man who was hired as a systems administrator, wrote Pompeo on March 6.

Snowden, who is exiled in Russia, is scheduled to speak to conference-goers about national security and surveillance through a video conference titled A Virtual Conversation with Edward Snowden.

By allowing Snowden, who Pompeo described as a treasonous fugitive, to speak, the appearance will validate his behavior and actions of stealing thousands of classified documents, handing them over to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras on a thumb drive, and then fleeing to Russia.

RELATED: WIKILEAKS FOUNDER HINTS AT 'UPCOMING' INFO LEAK

In the letter, Pompeo says the conference will only be a softball interview, and gives a common criminal and traitor a venue to stay in the good graces of his new home nation, he wrote.

Once Snowden ends his outreach shaming the U.S., he stops being useful to the Kremlin, he says.

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Kansas Congressman: Cut Edward Snowden from SXSW schedule ...

Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who has leaked large amounts of classified information about the agency's electronic surveillance programs, spoke via video to a sympathetic audience at South By Southwest Interactive on Monday.

Snowden, who is wanted for prosecution in the U.S., was in Russia, where he's been given temporary asylum. Repeating things he's said before, Snowden declared Monday that he would do what he did all over again because he had seen the Constitution being "violated on a massive scale."

The Obama administration disagrees, though Snowden's revelations did begin a process that earlier this year led the president to say he wants the NSA to stop holding on to massive amounts of "metadata" about the phone calls and electronic communications of millions of people around the world.

We posted some highlights from Snowden's comments. As you'll see, he faced no tough questions.

Earlier today, All Tech Considered previewed his SXSW appearance.

Update at 1:02 p.m. ET. Would He Do It Again? "Absolutely Yes":

The last question to Snowden is about whether he would do what he's done again. "Absolutely yes," he says, adding that he "took an oath to support and defend the Constitution and I saw the Constitution ... being violated on a massive scale."

The surveillance programs, he adds, take the Constitution's prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures and turn it into "any seizure is fine, just don't search it."

Update at 12:59 p.m. ET. The Problem With Contractors:

Snowden has worked both inside the government and for contractors outside it. The problem with contractors, he says, is that "they aren't accountable."

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Edward Snowden Tells SXSW He'd Leak Those Secrets Again