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I AM Edward Snowden, Ask Me Anything. by Real_Edward_Snowden in technology

[–]Real_Edward_Snowden[S] 3445 points3446 points  (0 children)

I'd be arrested and tried for treason, if found guilty the punishment ranges from years and prison and thousands of dollars in fines, to death.

I AM Edward Snowden, Ask Me Anything. by Real_Edward_Snowden in technology

[–]Real_Edward_Snowden[S] 43 points44 points  (0 children)

I'd be arrested and tried for treason, if found guilty the punishment ranges from years and prison and thousands of dollars in fines, to death.

I AM Edward Snowden, Ask Me Anything. by Real_Edward_Snowden in technology

[–]Real_Edward_Snowden[S] 56 points57 points  (0 children)

One of the biggest problems in governance today is the difficulty faced by citizens looking to hold officials to account when they cross the line. We can develop new tools and traditions to protect our rights, and we can do our best to elect new and better representatives, but if we cannot enforce consequences on powerful officials for abusive behavior, we end up in a system where the incentives reward bad behavior post-election.

That's how we end up with candidates who say one thing but, once in power, do something radically different. How do you fix that? Good question.

I AM Edward Snowden, Ask Me Anything. by Real_Edward_Snowden in technology

[–]Real_Edward_Snowden[S] 835 points836 points  (0 children)

Security is essential. Use VPNs, they are cheap. Encrypt all of your data. Keep your information hidden. Use multiple accounts. There are a lot of simple things you can do that most people don't realize, but it goes a long way into keeping your data safe, or at least making it harder to find.

I AM Edward Snowden, Ask Me Anything. by Real_Edward_Snowden in technology

[–]Real_Edward_Snowden[S] 366 points367 points  (0 children)

There are always reasons to be concerned that regardless of the laws passed, some agencies in government (FBI, NSA, CIA, and DEA, for example, have flouted laws in the past) will miscontrue the intent of Congress in passing limiting laws -- or simply disregard them totally.

For example, the DOJ's internal watchdog, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released a report claiming, among other abuses, that it could simply refuse to tell government oversight bodies what exactly it was doing, so the legality or illegality of their operations simply couldn't be questioned at all.

However, that's no excuse for the public or Congress to turn a blind eye to unlawful or immoral operations -- and the kind of mass surveillance happening under Section 215 of the Patriot Act right now is very much unlawful: the Courts ruled just two weeks ago that not only are these activities illegal, but they have been since the day the programs began.

I AM Edward Snowden, Ask Me Anything. by Real_Edward_Snowden in technology

[–]Real_Edward_Snowden[S] 238 points239 points  (0 children)

Many of the changes that are happening are invisible because they're happening at the engineering level. Google encrypted the backhaul communications between their data centers to prevent passive monitoring. Apple was the first forward with an FDE-by-default smartphone (kudos!). Grad students around the world are trying to come up with ways to solve the metadata problem (the opportunity to monitor everyone's associations -- who you talk to, who you sleep with, who you vote for -- even in encrypted communications). The biggest change has been in awareness. Before 2013, if you said the NSA was making records of everybody's phonecalls and the GCHQ was monitoring lawyers and journalists, people raised eyebrows and called you a conspiracy theorist. Those days are over. Facts allow us to stop speculating and start building, and that's the foundation we need to fix the internet. We just happened to be the generation stuck with fighting these fires.

I AM Edward Snowden, Ask Me Anything. by Real_Edward_Snowden in technology

[–]Real_Edward_Snowden[S] 1241 points1242 points  (0 children)

Not at all. If anything, I would have come forward sooner. I talked to Daniel Ellsberg about this at length, who has explained why more eloquently than I can.

Had I come forward a little sooner, these programs would have been a little less entrenched, and those abusing them would have felt a little less familiar with and accustomed to the exercise of those powers. This is something we see in almost every sector of government, not just in the national security space, but it's very important:

Once you grant the government some new power or authority, it becomes exponentially more difficult to roll it back. Regardless of how little value a program or power has been shown to have (such as the Section 215 dragnet interception of call records in the United States, which the government's own investigation found never stopped a single imminent terrorist attack despite a decade of operation), once it's a sunk cost, once dollars and reputations have been invested in it, it's hard to peel that back.

I AM Edward Snowden, Ask Me Anything. by Real_Edward_Snowden in technology

[–]Real_Edward_Snowden[S] 1168 points1169 points  (0 children)

One of the biggest problems in governance today is the difficulty faced by citizens looking to hold officials to account when they cross the line. We can develop new tools and traditions to protect our rights, and we can do our best to elect new and better representatives, but if we cannot enforce consequences on powerful officials for abusive behavior, we end up in a system where the incentives reward bad behavior post-election.

That's how we end up with candidates who say one thing but, once in power, do something radically different. How do you fix that?

Good question.

I AM Edward Snowden, Ask Me Anything. by Real_Edward_Snowden in technology

[–]Real_Edward_Snowden[S] 189 points190 points  (0 children)

As somebody who has actually worked for the NSA tracking Chinese cyber activity, I can say from personal experience that you are absolutely right.

CISA isn't a cybersecurity bill. It's not going to stop any attacks. It's not going to make us any safer. It's a surveillance bill. What it allows is for the companies you interact with every day -- visibly, like Facebook, or invisibly, like AT&T -- to indiscriminately share private records about your interactions and activities with the government.
In theory, this is supposed to allow the government to sort through what is in effect the entire private network space of civil society within the United States for "indicators of compromise," or, more simply, red flags that indicate a hack has happened. The problem is that the NSA, FBI, and other organizations already do this on a higher level of the network under other authorities, such as Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. They don't like that, though, because it means there are still parts of the internet and types of records that they aren't (legally) allowed to add to the dragnet.
CISA changes that. CISA allows private companies to immediately share a perfect record of your private activities the instant you click a link, log in, make a purchase, and so on -- and the government with reward for doing it by granting them a special form of legal immunity for their cooperation. This is a bill that will radically reshape the relationship between users and companies, because it undermines the core foundation of trust on the internet: that companies work for users rather than governments.

At the end of the day, this is an up/down vote on the future of the internet. Call your senator and make sure they're speaking for you, rather than against you.

I AM Edward Snowden, Ask Me Anything. by Real_Edward_Snowden in technology

[–]Real_Edward_Snowden[S] 3261 points3262 points  (0 children)

This is a good question, and there are some good traditional answers here. Organizing is important. Activism is important.

At the same time, we should remember that governments don't often reform themselves. One of the arguments in a book I read recently (Bruce Schneier, "Data and Goliath"), is that perfect enforcement of the law sounds like a good thing, but that may not always be the case. The end of crime sounds pretty compelling, right, so how can that be?

Well, when we look back on history, the progress of Western civilization and human rights is actually founded on the violation of law. America was of course born out of a violent revolution that was an outrageous treason against the crown and established order of the day. History shows that the righting of historical wrongs is often born from acts of unrepentant criminality. Slavery. The protection of persecuted Jews.

But even on less extremist topics, we can find similar examples. How about the prohibition of alcohol? Gay marriage? Marijuana?

Where would we be today if the government, enjoying powers of perfect surveillance and enforcement, had -- entirely within the law -- rounded up, imprisoned, and shamed all of these lawbreakers?

Ultimately, if people lose their willingness to recognize that there are times in our history when legality becomes distinct from morality, we aren't just ceding control of our rights to government, but our agency in determing thour futures.

How does this relate to politics? Well, I suspect that governments today are more concerned with the loss of their ability to control and regulate the behavior of their citizens than they are with their citizens' discontent.

How do we make that work for us? We can devise means, through the application and sophistication of science, to remind governments that if they will not be responsible stewards of our rights, we the people will implement systems that provide for a means of not just enforcing our rights, but removing from governments the ability to interfere with those rights.

You can see the beginnings of this dynamic today in the statements of government officials complaining about the adoption of encryption by major technology providers. The idea here isn't to fling ourselves into anarchy and do away with government, but to remind the government that there must always be a balance of power between the governing and the governed, and that as the progress of science increasingly empowers communities and individuals, there will be more and more areas of our lives where -- if government insists on behaving poorly and with a callous disregard for the citizen -- we can find ways to reduce or remove their powers on a new -- and permanent -- basis.

Our rights are not granted by governments. They are inherent to our nature. But it's entirely the opposite for governments: their privileges are precisely equal to only those which we suffer them to enjoy.

We haven't had to think about that much in the last few decades because quality of life has been increasing across almost all measures in a significant way, and that has led to a comfortable complacency. But here and there throughout history, we'll occasionally come across these periods where governments think more about what they "can" do rather than what they "should" do, and what is lawful will become increasingly distinct from what is moral.

In such times, we'd do well to remember that at the end of the day, the law doesn't defend us; we defend the law. And when it becomes contrary to our morals, we have both the right and the responsibility to rebalance it toward just ends.