Edward Snowden: We Need to Take Back Our Privacy

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Edward Snowden speaks via Google Hangouts at the Personal Democracy Forum conference in New York, on June 5, 2014.

By Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai2014-06-05 16:58:01 UTC

Edward Snowden made a call to take back privacy with technology, supporting an anti-surveillance campaign called Reset The Net during a talk on Thursday — the anniversary of the first published NSA surveillance revelation.

Speaking via Google Hangouts from Russia, Snowden noted that trust in both the U.S. tech sector and politician institutions has eroded. But the good news, Snowden said, is that netizens don't have to rely on governments to protect their privacy rights anymore.

See also: The 10 Biggest Revelations From Edward Snowden's Leaks

"We're past the point where citizens are entirely dependent on governments to defend our privacy, we don't have to ask for our privacy, we can take it back," he said during a talk with Electronic Frontier Foundation cofounder J.P. Barlow at the Personal Democracy Forum conference in New York City. "We can do it with our technology applied in new innovative ways.”

Snowden also endorsed the Reset the Net campaign, which aims to promote web encryption across major websites like Google, Tumblr, Wordpress and others, to promote consumer encryption tools that would make NSA surveillance harder and more expensive.

"We have the technology, and adopting encryption is the first effective step that everyone can take to end mass surveillance," Snowden wrote in a statement on Wednesday supporting Reset the Net, which was launched by Internet freedom activist group Fight for the Future, a group mostly famous for being one of the driving forces behind the anti-SOPA protests in early 2012.

But it's not just about technology. To stop NSA surveillance, Snowden called for people across the world — and the U.S. particularly — to get more political.

"We need to vote," he said, because even if you trust this government and this Congress, the next government might abuse these surveillance powers more.

"It's a system of turnkey tyranny," he went on. "It passed in secret, behind close doors, and now we live in it. The question is, what are we going to do about it?"

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Topics: edward snowden, NSA, privacy, surveillance, U.S., US & World, World