NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has called on designers, developers and technologists across the globe to build communications systems which can shut out prying state-sponsored snoopers.
Speaking via an online link up from Russia at the Hope X hacker conference in New York, Snowden responded to a question from a Twitter user around what those in technology can do to “make things better”.
“When I talk about this I say ‘encryption; encryption, encryption, encryption’, because it’s an important first step,” he said.
Warning that the same tools techniques used by governments to detect spies are employed to root out troublesome journalists, he called on technologists passionate about freedom of speech and protecting civil liberties to join forces in developing NSA-proof systems.
He said that a “peer review model” would bring the best results. “We need people to attack these systems and work as adversaries to find holes so we can fix them,” Snowden argued.
The user experience is a major consideration when building such systems, he added, claiming that PGP alternative GPG, while “robust and reliable”, is “damn near unusable”.
“We need … non-attributable communication, or unattributable internet access that’s easy, that’s transparent and that’s reliable and we can use not just in the US but around the world because this is a global problem,” he claimed.
While the likes of the NSA and FBI are under the spotlight at present this is only the beginning and things around the world “will get a lot worse before they get better”, Snowden warned.
As such, the country’s best and brightest computer science grads need to think in adversarial terms, about “how are the worst people on Earth going to try and subvert and break your system”.
Referencing Julian Assange’s famous call to action for hackers of the world to unite, Snowden also argued that technologists have a duty to teach those around them to “shift the middle ground of technical literacy for the next generation”.
A lot of young people know how to use tech "to an extent” but don’t know “where the dangers are” he added.
“We all … have a civic duty to help educate the people around us, just like the rise of literacy,” he said.
“We have to teach people in our society how to interact with technology safely, reliably and in a way that serves the interests of all of us – not a select few. We don’t want a high priesthood of technology no matter how good that is for us, because that’s bad for the world.”