No regrets about revelations of NSA mass surveillance: Snowden
11 Mar 2014
National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden said he had no regrets about his revelations of the agency's mass surveillance programme.
He was addressing a packed audience at the South By Southwest Interactive Festival via live video conference.
The former NSA contractor, who has been granted temporary asylum is living in Moscow and has felony charges slapped against him by the US, for leaking thousands of classified documents to media outlets.
Principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Christopher Soghoian, spoke to Snowden from the Austin, Texas, event along with Snowden's legal adviser, the ACLU's Ben Wizner.
The former NSA contractor dwelt on several issues in the hour-long conversation. He offered advice on how US citizens could keep their web-surfing activities more private, using a free service called Tor, which encrypted web traffic. He also said the technology industry needed to create more software and services that helped guard individual privacy.
Snowden seemed to not have any regrets about exposing the surveillance methods of the US government.
"And when it comes to would I do this again, the answer is absolutely yes," he told the audience.
"I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution, and I saw that the Constitution was violated on a massive scale," he added.
Snowden had an audience of three roomfuls of international tech specialists and though they often had to struggle to hear his words in video that was choppy and often inaudible, his message was loud and clear - personal information was vulnerable not only to government prying but increasingly to non-government players as companies had failed to adequately protect the data of their customers.
Snowden warned, "If we allow the NSA to continue unrestrained, every other government will accept that as a green light to do the same."
Snowden also took questions from the audience and the first to question came from Timothy John Berners-Lee, a UK scientist known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, who asked him how he would create an accountability system for governance.
"We have an oversight model that could work. The problem is when the overseers are not interested in oversight," Snowden said. "The key factor is accountability."
