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Publicerad den 11 mar 2014
Speaking
remotely from Russia on Monday, former National Security Agency
contractor Edward Snowden told attendees at the SXSW Interactive
conference in Austin, Texas that encryption is still a powerful
deterrent against government surveillance.Courtesy: The Texas Tribune.
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About the 2014 SXSW Interactive Festival
The 21st annual SXSW Interactive Festival returns to Austin from Friday, March 7 through Tuesday, March 11.
An incubator of cutting-edge technologies and digital creativity, the 2014 event features five days of compelling presentations and panels from the brightest minds in emerging technology, scores of exciting networking events hosted by industry leaders and an unbeatable lineup of special programs showcasing the best new websites, video games and startup ideas the community has to offer. From hands-on training to big-picture analysis of the future, SXSW Interactive has become the place to preview the technology of tomorrow today. [...]
http://sxsw.com/interactive/about
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RT 2014-03-10.
Speaking remotely from Russia on Monday, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden told attendees at the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Texas that encryption is still a powerful deterrent against government surveillance.
Nearly nine months to the day after he revealed himself to be the source responsible for a cache of leaked NSA documents, Snowden participated via video link in a conversation with two representatives from the American Civil Liberties Union to discuss encryption and surveillance at one of the largest tech conference in the United States.
Snowden, 30, said he chose the SXSW Interactive conference to make remarks because the event attracts “the folks who can really fix things” on a technical level as lawmakers in Washington still struggle to pass any sort of measure meant to reform the NSA practices exposed by the former contractor’s leaks.
“There is a policy response that needs to occur, but there is also a technical response that needs to occur,” Snowden said. “It’s the development community that can really craft those solutions and make sure we’re safe.”
But while programmers and developers continue to spend countless hours trying to make those solutions come to life — especially after Snowden’s revelations — much of the connected world is still at a loss when it comes to understanding how to encrypt digital communications in an easy-to-understand manner.
At least twice during the event, Snowden jokingly referred to what he called the “Glenn Greenwald Test,” named in honor of the American journalist who was unable to initially communicate with the NSA contractor because of his inability to decrypt sensitive emails.
“If any journalist in the world gets an email” of importance," Snowden said, “…they need to be able to open it.”
Snowden said that journalists shouldn’t be the only ones relying on encryption, though, and that both activists and grandparents alike need to be able to understand simple ways to keep their communications secure — something that Snowden said is the easiest way to keep the NSA and other government agencies from being able to conduct mass surveillance in bulk.
“We should understand that most regular people are not going to go out and download an obscure encryption app,” ACLU technologist Chris Soghoian said from the stage in Austin. “What I want is for the next WhatsApp or the next Twitter to be using encrypted end-to-end communications.”
But already, Soghoian said, some tech companies have made that realization on their own and altered their products accordingly to make their customer’s privacy more important than ever.
“In the last eight months, the big Silicon Valley tech companies have really improved their security in a way that’s surprising to many of us,” he said. “Without Ed’s disclosures, many of the tech companies would not have improved their security, either at all or at the rate they did.”
With the rest of Silicon Valley showing plenty of room for improvement, though, Snowden said this new trend of incorporating encryption needs to continue to grow. “We need to think about encryption not as this sort of arcane, black art,” Snowden added later on. “It’s a basic protection.”
Encryption, he added, makes it “very difficult for any sort of mass surveillance” to occur since it obfuscates the intelligence being sought in bulk by governments, as evident in programs first made public last year thanks to Snowden’s revelations.
“Let’s put it this way,” Snowden added. “The United States government has assembled a massive investigation team into me personally, into my work with the journalists, and they still have no idea what documents were provided to the journalist, what they have, what they don’t have, because encryption works.”
“If the government really wants to get into your computer,” Soghoian said later, “….they will find a way. But that won’t involve breaking the encryption. That involves breaking the device.”
“If you are a target of the NSA, it’s going to be game over no matter what unless you are taking really sophisticated steps to protecting yourself,” Soghoian added. With regards to the bulk surveillance programs that can indiscriminately monitor millions of people at once, though, Soghoian says encryption makes such spying endeavors too expensive for governments to undertake.
“If we start using encrypted communication services, suddenly it becomes too expensive for the NSA,” he said. “Encryption technology, even if imperfect, has the potential to raise the cost of surveillance to the point that it no longer becomes economically feasible for the government to spy on everyone.”
And according to Snowden, the government is indeed doing just that right now. “The interpretation of the Constitution had been changed in secret from ‘No unreasonable searches and seizures’ to, ‘Hey, any seizure is fine; just don’t search it,” he said. "And that’s something the public ought to know about.”
Elsewhere during his question-and-answer session, Snowden — speaking in front of a green screen digitally altered to display Article 1 of the US Constitution — said he would “absolutely” disclose documents all over again, even though his actions thus far have branded him a fugitive and traitor by many.
"I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution and I saw that the Constitution was being violated on a massive scale,” he said.
Snowden and Soghoian were joined by Ben Wizner, an ACLU attorney who has personally advised the former contractor with legal assistance since he became stuck near Moscow last year. Greenwald, the journalist who first reported on Snowden’s leaks, is scheduled to speak remotely at SXSW Interactive later Monday afternoon.
http://rt.com/usa/snowden-soghoian-sxsw-interactive-914/
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Snowdens tal från SXSW, den interaktiva teknik-festivalen i Texas - via videolänk från Ryssland
--Snowden accuses Senate Intelligence Committee chair of hypocrisy--
SvaraRaderaPublished time: March 11, 2014
Only hours after United States Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) lashed out at the Central Intelligence Agency for allegedly spying on congressional committee members, former government contractor Edward Snowden accused her of hypocrisy.
Sen. Feinstein — the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee — made headlines early Tuesday morning by calling out the CIA on the floor of Congress.
Committee member staffers were unknowingly monitored by the CIA while investigating the agency’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques, Feinstein said, potentially violating the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution and a presidential order barring the CIA from domestic spying.
By early afternoon, NBC News had acquired a statement authored by Mr. Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who has been accused of espionage for disclosing sensitive documents pertaining to US government’s vast surveillance operations.
“It's clear the CIA was trying to play 'keep away' with documents relevant to an investigation by their overseers in Congress, and that's a serious constitutional concern,” Snowden told NBC News.
“But it's equally if not more concerning that we're seeing another 'Merkel Effect,' where an elected official does not care at all that the rights of millions of ordinary citizens are violated by our spies, but suddenly it's a scandal when a politician finds out the same thing happens to them."[...]
http://rt.com/usa/snowden-feinstein-cia-ventura-206/
Assange: NSA, GCHQ’s ability to surveil everyone on planet ‘almost here’
SvaraRaderaMarch 08, 2014
The NSA and GCHQ will soon have the ability to spy on the entire planet, as their capabilities double every 18 months, Julian Assange told the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference on Saturday.
The Wikileaks founder made a Skype appearance at the interactive technology festival, which is taking place in the city of Austin.
“The ability to surveil everyone on the planet is almost there, and arguably will be there in a few years,” said Assange. “And that’s led to a huge transfer of power from the people who are surveilled upon to those who control the surveillance complex. It’s an interesting postmodern version of power.”
Assange also posed the question, “How is it that the internet that everyone looked upon as perhaps the greatest tool of human creation that had ever been has, in fact, been co-opted and [is] now involved in the most aggressive form of state surveillance the world has ever seen?”
He added that the world is “moving into a new totalitarian world — not in the sense of Stalin or Pol Pot, but totalitarian in the sense that the surveillance is total.” [...]
“There has been a military occupation of internet space – a very serious phenomenon," Assange told the attendees.
Before Wikileaks exposures, "we weren't actually living in the world, we were living in some fictitious representation of the world," Assange noted.
The surveillance of the internet is “the penetration of our civilian society. It means that there has been a militarization of our civilian space. A military occupation of the Internet, our civilian space, is a very serious one.”
“Only a fool has no fear. Courage is seeing fear,” he said. [...]
http://rt.com/news/assange-surveillance-nsa-total-698/