'Tech Can Be a Champion of Privacy,' Edward Snowden Tells Tech Leaders at SXSW
Edward Snowden had a message for some two dozen technology leaders at the SXSW Interactive festival today: “Tech can be a champion of privacy.”
In an hour-long meeting conducted through Google Hangout, the whistleblower and tech leaders discussed the role of the tech community in curtailing mass surveillance and protecting the Internet from forces seeking to weaken it. The participants represented a range of interests and industries, and included former White House technology officers, startup CEOs, policy experts, engineers, and venture capitalists. All of them are concerned about the future of privacy, the confidence of their customers, and governments chipping away at the security of their products and the net as a whole.
The meeting was something of a sequel to Snowden’s bigger , his first live appearance since his disclosures began in June 2013. As the ACLU’s Ben Wizner, who represents Snowden, noted in his introduction today, the tech community has, in many ways, heeded Snowden’s call from last year to develop tools to protect users where government has stalled. Indeed, the most significant privacy developments of late have originated from tech companies who have recognized their role in combating the government’s exploitation of their tools and its staggering violations of citizens’ trust and privacy.
In the last year and a half, different forms of encryption have been implemented on countless websites and tools, spreading to companies as mainstream as Apple, and . That raises the cost of mass surveillance, forces the NSA to focus on actual targets where there’s evidence of espionage or terrorism, and helps expand the market for privacy. As a result, web security is no longer the province of techies alone.
This cultural shift was palpable in the room today, where participants expressed overwhelming gratitude for Snowden’s disclosures and their impact, discussed today’s biggest threats to tech companies, and asked how they could better defend their users from a government seeking to weaken the Internet in the name of surveillance.
Unsurprisingly, the tech community is making no friends in the intelligence community by promoting and implementing encryption across a range of platforms.
In response, the government is to give it backdoor access to their products, even though foreign governments and criminal hackers will find and exploit these vulnerabilities too. “It’s not that we’re trying to lock law enforcement out,” Snowden said. “But to make a secure system it has to be secure against everyone.”
Snowden proposed mechanisms to support the technologists seeking vulnerabilities in online systems, so that the people who discover them don’t sell them to the government, which pays big bucks to use them and make sure they go unfixed. What we need, he said, is a strong community working in the public interest to identify vulnerabilities and fix them.
The discussion also covered the use of surveillance tactics by local law enforcement agencies, which benefit from privacy law advancing at a snail’s pace while technology zooms ahead. As we’ve seen in the case of Stingray technology, , surveillance tools once considered extreme can trickle down and become commonplace among local police before Congress or the courts finally act to regulate them.
Tech executives also had questions for the whistleblower. Barclaycard CIO Boe Hartman asked about the ethics of predictive analysis, and Swiftkey co-founder Ben Medlock about the obligations of tech companies to disclose to users how they use their data. Snowden’s answer: transparency and the opt-in principle, always. It’s critical that people achieve a measure of control over the data that is collected about them and how it’s used. If companies never offer an opportunity to opt-in, they risk outrage when their policies are ultimately exposed.
Danny Weitzer, former White House deputy chief technology officer for Internet policy, said to Snowden, “I hope you know that the revelations you have made have changed the balance inside the U.S. government. What you’ve done has empowered people who were trying to speak toward a more open view of the Internet, a more civil rights and human rights view of the Internet.”
We hope he’s right. With multiple challenges in federal court and another opportunity for congressional reform coming up, it’s time for our public institutions of power to finally catch up.
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Press ReleaseDec 2024
Free Speech
National Security
ACLU and Partners Urge Supreme Court to Block TikTok BanACLU and Partners Urge Supreme Court to Block TikTok Ban
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Press ReleaseDec 2024
National Security
Religious Liberty
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VirginiaDec 2024
National Security
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Our client, Nizar Trabelsi, is in the United States against his will. The federal government brought him here from Belgium more than a decade ago and charged him with terrorism-related crimes. At trial, the government’s case failed: a federal jury found Mr. Trabelsi not guilty. But instead of allowing Mr. Trabelsi to return to Belgium after his acquittal, the United States placed him in highly restrictive immigration detention and began an ongoing effort to force him to Tunisia, where he was born and where he will very likely be tortured. Mr. Trabelsi’s detention violates the Constitution, immigration law, and the extradition treaty between the United States and Belgium. Through this lawsuit, he seeks to return to Belgium, and he demands an immediate improvement of his detention conditions. -
Press ReleaseDec 2024
National Security
Immigrants' Rights
Federal Judge Rejects Acquitted Man’s Argument That His Immigration Detention Is UnlawfulFederal Judge Rejects Acquitted Man’s Argument That His Immigration Detention Is Unlawful
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — This week, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled that the court does not have jurisdiction to decide whether the government can continue to detain Nizar Trabelsi, a Tunisian national who was brought to the United States against his will for prosecution and was cleared of all charges last year. The ruling means the United States will be able to continue to detain Mr. Trabelsi while it attempts to deport him to Tunisia, where he was born and where, as an immigration judge ruled earlier this year, he will likely face torture. The court also concluded that even if it did have jurisdiction over Mr. Trabelsi’s case, his claims challenging the government’s detention of him would fail. “Reviewing claims that the government is holding someone unlawfully is at the core of the judicial function, and we’re heartbroken for our client that the court got this so wrong,” said Brett Max Kaufman, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Center for Democracy. “The government’s arguments in defense of Mr. Trabelsi’s detention makes a hash of the Constitution, immigration laws, and its own extradition treaty.” In 2013, the United States forcibly extradited Mr. Trabelsi from Belgium to face criminal charges in the United States. In July 2023, after almost 10 years of highly restrictive pretrial detention, a federal jury cleared Mr. Trabelsi of all charges. But instead of releasing Mr. Trabelsi or returning him to Belgium, the U.S. transferred him to immigration detention, wrongly treating him as an applicant for admission and placing him in the deportation process. Over the years, the Belgian government has issued multiple formal diplomatic requests asking the U.S. to facilitate his return, but the U.S. has refused to send him back. Mr. Trabelsi filed a lawsuit challenging the government's authority to detain him. He also sought immediate improvements to his detention conditions. Those claims were not part of the court’s ruling today, and will continue to be litigated on a separate track. “Mr. Trabelsi only wants to return to Belgium after being illegally extradited to the United States, held for ten years, and then acquitted by a jury of any crimes,” said Nicole Hallett, clinical professor of law and director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School. “He cannot be held indefinitely and we will continue to fight to make sure that justice ultimately prevails.” Mr. Trabelsi is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, the University of Chicago Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, the ACLU of Virginia, and Professor Jonathan Hafetz of Seton Hall Law School. The complaint in Trabelsi v. Crawford was filed against Jeffrey Crawford, warden of the Farmville Detention Center where Mr. Trabelsi is being held; Liana Castano, ICE field office director for the Washington Field Office; Alejandro Mayorkas, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security; and Merrick Garland, U.S. attorney general.