In his first live public appearance since leaking thousands of classified intelligence documents and fleeing to Russia, Edward Snowden has accused the NSA of “setting fire to the future of the internet”.
Snowden was livestreamed as part of a panel discussion on how NSA spying impacts the tech community at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, much to the anger of some US politicians who consider him to be a traitor. Others on the panel included American Civil Liberties Union’s Ben Wizner and Christopher Soghoian.
Snowden complained that politicians in Congress were failing to do their job and oversee the NSA, and warned that the intelligence agency were destroying the freedoms that the internet offers and “setting fire” to its future. However, he described the tech community crowd as the “firefighters” in developing new ways to combat the NSA’s mass surveillance programs, such as by using end-to-end encryption and TOR for anonymisation.
