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Edward Snowden has called on supporters at the HOPE hacking conference to develop easy-to-use technologies to subvert government surveillance programs.
Mr Snowden, who addressed conference attendees on Saturday via video link from Moscow, said he intends to devote much of his time to promoting such technologies, including ones that allow people to communicate anonymously and encrypt their messages.
"You in this room, right now, have both the means and the capability to improve the future by encoding our rights into programs and protocols by which we rely every day," he told the New York City conference, known as Hackers on Planet Earth, or HOPE. "That is what a lot of my future work is going to be involved in."
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NSA Whistleblower Snowden Seeks to Develop Anti-Surveillance Technologies
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O, it is excellent
To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.
-- Shakespeare, "Measure for Measure", II, 2
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday July 22 2014, @01:48PM
Snowden has become a personal hero of mine, but he emphasizes purely defensive, reactive measures. As such they sound to me like, if we extend that approach to other areas, we can stop gun deaths if only we can get everyone to wear full body armor all the time, or to prevent burglaries we only need to dig moats around every house and cover every approach with motion tracking auto-cannon.
The reality is, the NSA, GCHQ, and the Five Eyes have declared war on us citizens and our freedom. We have by now abundant evidence that they consider us the primary threat (certainly they don't terrorists, because they catch none). They watch everything we do, steal all our secrets and private moments, run teams to undermine peaceable public discourse, conduct economic warfare against us, and generally subvert everything about our democracy and way of life.
It does not make sense to do nothing to fight back beyond better body armor. We need hackers and general citizens to make the NSA and their enablers experience real, personal consequences for their crimes and their attacks on our freedom. Let's set up cameras on the approaches to the NSA parking lot and capture license plate numbers. Let's track those cars back to their origin and de-anonymize the people who drive them. Publish a list on Tor of their names and addresses, and everything about them. Let's publish what their medical secrets are, what websites they visit, the naughty things they do. Let's upload captures of the lascivious things they say to *their* wives and partners in their phone conversations. Let's task drones to follow them around their neighborhoods and grocery stores. They deserve much, much worse, and perhaps they will require worse, but that's a good list for starters. Let's give them and those who are failing to prosecute them a taste of their own medicine as a warning of what will come next if they continue to fail to uphold our laws.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday July 22 2014, @04:06PM
> prevent burglaries we only need to dig moats around every house and cover every approach with motion tracking auto-cannon
Newsletter please.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 22 2014, @04:17PM
Not sure that's the way to go. I feel your frustration though. Anon does things similar to what you describe, and they sometimes get it wrong, and destroy innocent people's lives. I think if we go on the offensive by supporting eff.org, aclu, etc., in trying to hold liars before Congress accountable so they do jail time, holding people who violate the law accountable by throwing them in jail, etc., is effort better spent than technological vigilantism. I don't want more surveillance, I want less, even if we "think" we're surveilling the right people to "treat them a lesson".