edward_snowden_aclu_sxsw_event_140310_snipFound at Golden Age of Gaia.

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Edward Snowden Speaks at Conference – "US Constitution Violated on a Mass Scale"
Posted by Stephen Cook on March 11, 2014

Stephen: Edward Snowden spoke at a major technology conference in Texas yesterday – 'punched in' from Russia via seven proxy servers! – at which he admitted he would "do it all again' when commenting on his role in the NSA leaks. The full speech he gave and the Q&A he participated in are in the video..

By Jon Swaine in New York and Jemima Kiss in Austin, The Guardian – March 11, 2014

http://tinyurl.com/nff833p

Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower whose unprecedented leak of top-secret documents led to a worldwide debate about the nature of surveillance, insisted on Monday that his actions had improved the national security of the United States rather than undermined it, and declared that he would do it all again despite the personal sacrifices he had endured.

In remarks to the SXSW culture and technology conference in Texas, delivered by video link from his exile in Russia, Snowden took issue with claims by senior officials that he had placed the US in danger. He also rejected as demonstrably false the suggestions by some members of Congress that his files had found their way into the hands of the intelligence agencies of China or Russia.
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Snowden spoke against the backdrop of an image of the US constitution, which he said he had taken an oath to protect but had seen "violated on a mass scale" while working for the US government. He accepted praise from Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, accorded the first question via Twitter, who described him as "acting profoundly in the public interest".

The session provided a rare and extensive glimpse into the thoughts of Snowden, granted temporary asylum by Russia after the US revoked his passport. He struck back strongly against claims made again last week by the NSA director, General Keith Alexander, that his release of secret documents to the Guardian and other outlets last year had weakened American cyber-defences.

"These things are improving national security, these are improving the communications not just of Americans, but everyone in the world," Snowden said. "Because we rely on the same standard, we rely on the ability to trust our communications, and without that, we don't have anything."

He added later that thanks to the more secure communication activity that had been encouraged by his disclosures, "the public has benefited, the government has benefited, and every society in the world has benefited".

Snowden rejected claims that potential adversaries of the US, such as Russia and China, had obtained the files he had been carrying. "That has never happened, and it is never going to happen. If suddenly the Chinese government knew everything the NSA was doing, we would notice the difference," said Snowden, noting that US infiltration of Russia and China was extensive.

He sharply criticised Alexander and Michael Hayden, his predecessor as NSA director, as the two officials to have most "harmed our internet security and actually our national security" in the era since the September 11 terrorist attacks by "elevating offensive operations" over cyber-defence.

"When you are the one country in the world that has a vault that is more full than everyone else's, it doesn't make any sense to be attacking all day and never defending your vault," he said.

"And it makes even less sense when you let the standards for vaults worldwide have a big back door that anyone can walk in."
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