14 DAY TRIAL // If you haven’t figured it out just yet, you should probably know that the most popular Internet services in the world aren’t exactly the safest if you want to stay below the NSA’s radar. Edward Snowden himself stepped out and made this clear during a recent interview.
As part of a remote interview with the New Yorker, Edward Snowden discussed several issues related to methods of protecting our privacy. Since he has a vast knowledge of how things work inside the NSA, Snowden was asked what we can do to protect our privacy.
The whistleblower called for a reform of government policies, saying that the attitude some people have in regards to this issue, saying they don’t have anything to hide, is wrong.
“When you say, ‘I have nothing to hide,’ you’re saying ‘I don’t care about this right.’ You’re saying ‘I don’t have this right, because I’ve got to the point where I have to justify it.’ The way rights work is, the governments has to justify its intrusion into your rights,” he said during the interview, adding that people who take this stance are inverting the model of responsibility for how rights work.
No more Dropbox, Facebook, Google
On an individual level, he urges people to seek out encrypted tools and to stop using the likes of Dropbox, Facebook and Google, which he reasons are “hostile to privacy.” “Get rid of Dropbox,” Snowden said, claiming that the service doesn’t support encryption, something he’s also said over the summer.
Then, however, the Dropbox team stepped out and defended the service, saying that all files sent and retrieved from Dropbox are encrypted while travelling between users and servers, as well as when they’re on the servers.
This hasn’t managed to sway Snowden’s opinion too much in the meantime. As for Google, it’s already known that the NSA has managed to crack the wall between the company’s data centers, gaining access to unencrypted information. This has irked Google’s engineers to no end and pushed them into action to start encrypting even more user data.
The whistleblower says that while Google and Facebook have improved their security, they continue to remain “dangerous services” that should be avoided. Considering that his own interview at the New Yorker Festival was via Google Hangouts or YouTube, and the fact that a Google logo was floating on the screen as Snowden was talking, was rather ironic.
Mobile encryption isn't going to stop the FBI from getting data
Edward Snowden also talked about the whole fuss that the FBI and the Attorney General are making regarding the encryption built in the new iOS and Android mobile operating systems. He said that law enforcement officials could still ask for warrants that would give them access to a suspect’s phone, including the key to the encrypted data.
Therefore, their claim that the data would be obsolete thanks to the new encryption setting has no base.