14 DAY TRIAL // Leaving the blatant violation of human rights layer of the NSA scandal aside, the most important element is the privacy of millions of innocent people who the intelligence agency spies on without a valid reason.
During the Hope X conference, where Snowden made a long-distance appearance, the whistleblower asked developers to start building systems that protect privacy and constitutional rights by design.
TechCrunch reports that Snowden was speaking via videolink from Russia where he’s still under asylum following his flea last year after sharing countless classified documents with the media.
The whistleblower responded to a series of questions. One was about what people in the tech business can do to fight against the dragnet data collection employed by the NSA and other intelligence agencies across the world. Snowden pointed out that encryption is the first step and it’s an extremely important one.
“It doesn’t end at encryption. It starts at encryption. Encryption protects the content, but we forget about associations. These programs like Section 215 and mass surveillance in general is not about surveilling you, it’s not about surveilling me; it’s about surveilling us collectively,” Snowden said.
He adds that developers need to start developing new protocols for privacy protection, and a new interface to aid this goal.
As far as programming goes, Snowden says that these protocols need to be resistant to traffic analysis. “They need to be padded, basically, even if there’s some level of performance penalty.” The whistleblower adds that some sort of mixed routing is also needed in order to divorce the individual connection from the individual origination point.
“We need encryption, mix routing, we need non-attributable communications. Or unattributable Internet access that’s available to people – that’s easy, that’s transparent and that’s reliable; that we can use not just here in the US but around the world because again, this is a global problem.”
Snowden says that the mass surveillance effort is basically a big data program which provides the raw data that can be analyzed, filtered and subjected to rules. He argues that such programs are unreasonably seizing information, which is against the 4th and 5th amendments, on top of violating the 1st amendment rights.
The whistleblower isn’t just talking big and ordering people around, telling them to do all the work while he sits back and relaxes in Russia. Snowden has already started working on tools to help protect journalists’ sources and more. This is important because it looks like the government is using the same practices to track down and identify journalists as it does to figure out who’s a spy.
“And that’s what a lot of my future work is going to be involved in and I hope that you will join me and the Freedom of the Press and every other organization in making that a reality,” Snowden said.